


small town, big flame

by novalotypo



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Exceptionally Lame Shadow Games, Gen, Humor, Not-So-Accidental Vigilantism, Post-Canon, but we find our own closure nonetheless, in that DSoD doesn't happen, this is perhaps not what he was expecting, yugi needs a break
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27510718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novalotypo/pseuds/novalotypo
Summary: Duel Monsters was one ofthosegames: the kind you’d definitely heard of somewhere, whether it be on the news or in ads or in an article about horrible incidents involving lots of collateral damage.If you were lucky, you’d have Yugi’s phone number on hand and could avoid troublesome explosions altogether. Not because he had a particularly good track record when it came to not destroying the city, but because he was friendly and if worst came to worst it was still easier to duck under a Black Burning than a Blue Stream of Destruction.This was Johanna’s current dilemma. One could even call it a conundrum.An exorcist, a chair-wielding accountant, and the King of Games walk into a haunted town.
Relationships: Mutou Yuugi & Original Character(s)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 61





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think yugi deserves a break every now and then. as such i will (checks notes) force him into a town of on-fire ghosts all while two insane youtubers relentlessly pester him and win shadow games by (checks notes again) utilizing extreme violence

It’d been _maybe_ an hour since they got off the train. 

It’d been _maybe_ fifteen minutes since Yilan mumbled a quiet warning into Johanna’s ear. It’d been _maybe_ fourteen-and-a-half minutes since Johanna peeked over her shoulder with all the practice of a wary content creator and met eyes with the... angel-punk kid. 

It’d been an hour, and the local Familymart had already been turned into a panic room. That was great and all—convenient location, cheap snacks, cashiers who face down god on a daily basis—but having your demons follow you in kind of defeated the purpose.

The demon in question was examining a holographic packet. He was studying it intently. 

I’m being intimidated by the real-life equivalent of a gacha whale, Johanna thought, but said, “They just keep getting shorter and shorter, don’t they?”

Yilan eyed the kid with the look of someone ready to walk out of the store with somebody else’s teeth in her hand. “He’s been following us,” she said suspiciously.

Johanna had to concede that was true. Normally, she’d be all for more drastic measures, such as employing the use of items that rhyme with chair. (Chair rhymed with chair, didn’t it?) 

However. The kid was wobbling over the five-foot line like doing so had broken several limbs. Everything about his heavy-handed eyeliner and misplaced belts screamed _punk_ , but his cheeks gave the impression that were exceptionally squishable. 

There was a time and a place for chairs. This was not it. “Are we sure he isn’t just... lost?” Johanna suggested.

“Maybe if he hadn’t gotten off at the same station at the exact same time. How far do you think he’d go if I pitched him?”

“He’s tiny and he’s buying trading cards. You’d send him twenty meters and we’d _both_ feel bad.”

“If he lost the belts and the chains, maybe twenty. With that hair? Twenty-five.”

“I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing,” said Johanna. She busied herself with a satchel of energy jelly as the kid pocketed his change. “You think with that look, he’d get away with mugging us in some alley? The police would go, _what did he look like_ , and anybody who has eyes would say, _a thousand spiders died in his hair and I want to give him my lunch_.”

Yilan’s frown turned contemplative. It was reassuring to travel with someone who could think up ten different ways of sending you to the hospital and enact them with frightening accuracy. 

“Let’s wait and see what he does,” Johanna suggested. “If he wants to talk, we can talk. It’ll make for interesting footage, at least.”

“So you say,” Yilan grumbled. Her expression as she unpacked her camera was a few steps shy from murderous.

Johanna, content in being the more approachable stranger, swiped a few more energy jellies into her basket and moved toward the cashier determinedly, all while the kid shuffled through his packet and gave the occasional glance upward.

He was smiling. Not the creepy, evil, body-hiding kind of smile. It was cheeky. It said, _you’re trying so hard I might just give you a sticker._

Johanna was familiar with it. That was the exact look Yilan levelled at anyone who challenged her to games involving frame-perfect inputs and extensive game knowledge. 

“Just this, please,” Johanna told the cashier. The cashier gave a muted smile and pretended to care when she went on, “You wouldn't believe how hot it is out there. It certainly makes filming a lot harder!”

The kid shifted his gaze over to Yilan’s bags. Yilan mercifully did not immediately throw hands.

“And I heard something about this town being ‘haunted’,” Johanna said, adding an exaggerated pair of air quotes as to not destroy her reputation too early. “Ghosts and demons or the like. To which I say: in this weather? Goodness, they must be determined! I’d be crawling back into my grave until September at the very least!”

The cashier, who was presumably imagining his happy place and receiving audio input of white noise, said, “Oh yes, it’s very warm.”

“It certainly is,” Johanna agreed. She slipped her change into the opposite pocket as her wallet. “Say, if you’re interested in ghost documentaries at all, you should give our channel a try. _Funky Ghouls_ on Youtube. New videos every week, docuseries updates every month.”

“Uh-huh,” said the cashier. “Have a nice day.”

Yilan trailed after Johanna and out of the shop, leaving the cashier to the mercy of whatever the rest of the day had to offer. The kid watched them through the glass doors, gave another cheeky smile to himself, and followed after them.

So that was great. Studded-metal babycheeks could be a thousand things, but scared of overenthusiastic content creators he was not. Which was kind of a shame, because waving your own banner—especially if that banner had ghosts and a large subscribe button—was a surefire way to get any reasonable person off your back, if only to preserve their own dignity.

Yilan swung her camera up. Fiddled around a bit. Settled her lips into a grimace that was only a little more irritated than normal.

“Right,” said Johanna. She turned and upgraded from making eye contact to holding it. “Is there something we can help you with?”

The kid’s grin inched upward. There was the suggestion of sheepishness, although it was hard to tell past the eyeliner. “Ah—I guess that speech was for me?”

“It’s for anybody who’ll listen,” said Johanna. “Tossing in a shill here and there only hurts your own dignity, which is why it’s easier to live with none. So? What do you want?”

The kid stared for a second. Then he tilted his head, which was doubly as disconcerting given his entire hairstyle went with him. “You make ghost documentaries,” he said. 

And there’s something about your eyes that seriously freaks me out, Johanna didn’t say. Instead, she said, “Among other videos.”

“Hm. So you have a lot of experience with ghosts, I guess.”

Even to a normal stranger, Johanna wouldn’t have come out with her typical spiel of _maybe_ having a history of paranormal run-ins and Yilan’s impressive portfolio of _maybe_ what could be considered exorcisms. 

This kid’s shadow was pointing a full ninety degrees away from every other shadow. It was probably some kind of sign from above. 

“Not really,” Johanna said, in a tone she hoped was casual. “Most of the time our videos turn into travel guides with spooky, royalty-free music.”

“But they’re good travel guides,” Yilan added. 

“Yes, well, drone footage makes everything look more professional,” said Johanna.

“Hm,” the kid repeated. 

He lapsed into silence again. His expression changed at least three different times, all in the spectrum of amusement-confusion-wariness, like he was presenting his thoughts to a board of advisors.

A board of mental advisors. Throat-cutting eyeliner, studded metal heels, a tye-dye porcupine for hair, and a proclivity for unsettling dramatic pauses. And the soul-piercing eyes, and also the physics-defying shadows.

Good footage, Johanna told herself, and took a breath. “Are you here for the ghosts as well?” she asked.

The kid brightened. It was like watching the sun rise. “I am!” he said cheerily, which was... not the answer Johanna had expected nor wanted to hear. 

Johanna squinted past the illuminating grin and the squishy cheeks. “Oh, cool,” she said, sounding to herself just as wary as she felt. “I guess we’re partners in crime! For now.”

“I’ll only be here for as long as it takes to find the game master,” the kid said. “I don’t suppose you’ll be here for long, either?”

“We’ll be here a week max,” Johanna answered. 

Yilan’s gaze briefly flickered to hers, and they shared the same thought for a moment, which was _what the fuck kind of game master are you looking for_ , followed by a trail of question marks the human voice had difficulty reproducing. Either the kid didn’t notice or, more likely, he couldn’t care less about what anybody thought about his eyeliner, his belts, his card-collecting hobby, or his evil shadow.

Common sense didn’t click the same way for this kid as it did the rest of the world. That was fine! It was manageable, even! It took some kind of freak to ward off a content creator. As off-putting as the kid was, all he had to threaten anyone with was a pocket of trading cards and five feet of sunshine-and-demons, plus whatever those chains and belts weighed. 

Yilan could chuck him up and over the Ayagami station sign. With that pleasant thought in mind, Johanna stuck out a hand. 

“Ghost hunters of a feather flock together,” she said firmly. “And you’re already in our video, so you might as well stick around.”

The kid took Johanna’s hand. He smiled, and the entire street went up in gold. “I suppose I will, then. I’m Yugi.”

Johanna felt the name was vaguely familiar, but her attention was mostly captured by the way his shadow stretched like a glob of black putty, adding a few significant inches to his tiny shadow.

Carefully, as if she had her hand stuck in a particularly rusty bear trap, Johanna retracted both her hand and her gaze. 

Yugi smiled. That particular curl of his lightly tinted lips said, _this is going to be interesting_ without giving a clear definition of _interesting_. His shadow smiled too, which was a detail Johanna could’ve lived without noticing.

This was a mistake. The kind of mistake that played nice and sweet and pretended it wasn’t going to knife you until you realized your back was against a wall because you had put it there yourself. 

But it would make for good content.

“Welp,” Yilan said, taking a hammer to the tense silence, “this episode is going to be interesting.”

  


* * *

  


The town of Ayagami had undergone two major changes in the past fifty years.

The first was back in the seventies, when the train station burnt down. Something or another about outdated wiring and a whole lot of wood made for a spectacular bonfire of suspect origins. Either way, the entire station caught fire. And then everything next to the station caught fire. And then everything next to _that_ caught fire, and by dinnertime an awful lot of people were sneezing ashes and wondering if it was their relatives that came out. 

The station had been rebuilt quickly. The town followed, albeit with a significant delay. For two months, any trains that passed through Ayagami Station would be treated to the wonderful view of a pristine station armed to the teeth with the newest vending machines, and a little ways beyond that, a town that was tripping over charcoal. And dead relatives. A little redundant, really.

All in all, not a bad place for ghost stories to spawn. Also, as they say in the business: _Yikes._

The second event to hit the town happened in the nineties. Compared to the, er, fireworks that came with the first, the second was tame by comparison. 

A monument went up, and around it, a park. All of it was erected in the most convenient empty space available, which was a graveyard. Specifically, a graveyard that hosted the pre-made ashes of a whole lot of people who were very dead, and presumably very angry.

The rumours circulated online followed a simple script: _I was out in the park alone when I heard someone screaming mercy. I was taking a late night stroll and saw a lady on fire. It always smells like burning, especially on hot summer days._

Now that was all good fun, but the timeline had a few kinks, and here was one: between the park’s inception and the influx of spooky reposts online was a solid twenty years of... absolutely nothing.

No ghosts, no ghost fire, no ghosts on fire. Obviously something had happened fairly recently. 

Had the ghosts gotten really pissed off all of a sudden, and all at once? Had someone gone in with a Ouija board and jabbed a sensitive spot? Was reality breaking off at the hinges?

All very reasonable questions! Johanna had a lot of reasonable questions to ask. She just hoped whatever she ended up interviewing had the proper vocal chords to answer.

Anyhow, Season Two so far had featured the normal variety of morbid subjects: murders, asylums, prisons, and other locations of general misery. A rural Japanese town full of angry, on-fire ghosts made for a nice palette cleanser. 

Also, the aerial shots of the hills were quite nice. If this whole adventure turned out to be a bust, then it could be easily salvaged into a travel guide. _Check out your nearest Japanese town! It might be haunted, but the curry shop across from the grocery store has the best lamb curry you’ll ever try!_

Said curry shop was their current conference room. The owner seemed quietly entertained, partly by the insane topic of discussion, partly by Yugi’s... well, Yugi’s everything.

“So we can assume that the park is our hotspot,” Johanna explained, tracing a finger along the map and up the trail to the graveyard. “It’s unusual, since most ghosts tend to stick around where they died, or where they experienced extreme emotional turmoil. Then again, it’s also strange that they’d be so angry because the town decided to set up a memorial. For them. So I think we’re probably dealing with a bigger, more recent issue here.”

“But this monument is right beside their graves,” Yugi pointed out.

“Right beside their graves,” Johanna agreed. She tapped the map twice. “But also _for them_. If that was really the issue, don’t you think our ghostly pals are being a bit ungrateful?”

“Guess big stone slabs next to your own smaller stone slab lowers land value,” Yilan said, through a mouthful of curry. 

Yugi gave them a look that he had adopted in the few hours they’d known each other: one part amusement, two parts tired acceptance. “If somebody erected a monument in your name thirty years after you died and put it right next to your house, wouldn’t you be a little annoyed having what’s essentially the physical manifestation of your lost potential right outside your window?”

Yilan wrinkled her nose. “If it’s been thirty years and you’re peeved that people are being nice to you for a change, maybe you should reevaluate your life. Or death.”

The camera captured Johanna and Yilan’s simultaneous grins as well as Yugi's single-brow scepticism: in focus and in frame, which meant Yugi was going to be on the receiving end of a lot of edits involving unnecessary zoom-ins and elevator music.

The guy—how was he twenty-two? Was his height inversely proportional to his age?—anyway, he was surprisingly good with cameras and seemed to always know where to stand and look for the shot to not look like garbage, which was a lot more Johanna could say for most of their impromptu interviewees. He had excellent camera sense, always knew which side was his good side, and had a knack for immediately noticing when he was being stared at. Which must have been pretty exhausting, considering his outfit of choice.

Yilan made a noise into her spoon. She flicked quickly through her phone, eyes narrowing in preparation to eviscerate a reply. “Ninecloud dropped out,” she said, annoyed.

Ah, right. Worlds. “They choked?”

“They were up two and went 0-3.”

“Ah. So... one hell of a hairball.”

Yugi looked between them. “Ninecloud?”

“Competitive League,” Yilan said, and refused to elaborate.

Johanna gave Yugi a placating smile. “Competitive online gaming,” she explained. “The World Championship is on right now, and Ninecloud—an American team—kind of... dropped the ball.”

The words _competitive_ and _game_ seemed to kick Yugi’s brain into high gear. His eyes narrowed slightly. The smile he adopted gave the impression that its owner was deciding which limb to gnaw off first. 

“You like games?” he asked.

Yilan raised her head. She paused in the middle of crafting a tastefully scathing reply. The quiet challenge in Yugi’s question pressed every button in her brain, and she said, “Maybe. Depends on the game.”

“You play League, then? Any others?”

“Sure. Not as much, though. I also mod for a few speedrun servers.” 

Now Yilan’s face was taking on attributes of Yugi’s. Her stare stepped up from scathing to burn-your-shadow-on-the-wall, effectively making it so you could hack at the tension with an axe and walk away with cheap firestarter. 

They were... bonding, in a weird, competitive, feral way, but they were bonding! That was good! Take away the throat-ripping vibes, and it was practically a normal conversation!

Johanna shifted away a few small but significant inches. She counted to five in her head, and with the restaurant still standing and not a smoldering ruin, she cleared her throat. “What games do you play?” she asked Yugi, practically beaming.

Yugi blinked one. And then twice. Then his smile returned with double the intensity and none of the edge. Any passersby walking by the window were presumably blinded. “Oh, I’ll play practically anything,” he said cheerily. “I just enjoy the back-and-forth of a good match, you know? But I do have a heavy hand in the Duel Monsters community.”

“ _That’s_ where I recognize you from,” Yilan said suddenly, research-fervour sharpness drawing out her lips. She tapped furiously away, waited for the results, and let out a quiet breath.

Johanna also held her breath, mostly for the sake of the moment. She peered over Yilan’s phone.

“Yugi Mouto, titled ‘King of Games’, First Place Winner of Duelist Kingdom, Battle City, Battle City V2, see more, list continues,” Johanna read aloud. There was a noticeable lag between her mouth and her brain. 

Yugi sat patiently. After a few moments, Johanna’s brain realized if it had been brought all the way to Japan, it probably had work to do. 

She looked up slowly.

“Huh,” said Johanna, as soon as her higher cognitive functions began operating normally. “What’s a guy like you doing out here, looking for ghosts?”

“And he’s got a match in a week,” Yilan added. “It’s against KaibaCorp’s newest AI, plus all their updated AR tech.” Her renewed suspicion was that of an individual who would face god and be unimpressed. “Curious that you’d make a random detour for a tiny town out in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s not as big of a deal as you think it is,” Yugi said casually. He pushed around a single cherry tomato with his spoon. “Kaiba likes tugging me all over the world to do this, do that, do both this and that at once in two separate places... I could use a vacation every now and then. Right?”

Ah, yes. The eponymous Kaiba. The dragon-loving, filthy-rich CEO with a vision of the future so ludicrous that it might just be crazy enough to work. Whom Yugi was familiar enough with to be smiling fondly as he batted his garnishes around. 

There was a sign in there, but Johanna was too scared to dig for it. 

“Sometimes it’s good to get away from expectations and all that,” Yugi said. “It’s nice to take a break from being yourself. You know?”

His smile flattened, turned contemplative. He studied the tomato like it was something a whole lot more important than a fruit, like a memory that had gone sour, or something just as painfully nostalgic.

Johanna cleared her throat. “Well,” she said brightly, “I don’t know about all that! But ghost-hunting tends to distract you from most everything else, given half the time you’re changing batteries and the other you’re trying not to die.”

Suddenly, Yugi was all attention. “Oh? And do you happen to almost die a lot on your trips?” 

“There was that one time in Barcelona,” Yilan offered.

Johanna nodded sadly. “And then in Madrid as well.”

“And the year after, in Rome. Why are Romans so rude?”

“At least most of their ominous notes are correctly spelled. Do you remember when we were in London? On our... second day of filming, I think?”

“When some asshole came at us with a _knife?_ ” Yilan said. “Yeah, I think I remember that.”

“Somebody attacked you with a knife?” Yugi asked politely.

“More something than someone,” said Johanna. “He was half-transparent and spoke a dialect that’s been out of use for well over a century. No worries, though—Yilan took care of him!” 

After a brief moment of silent inquiry, Yugi glanced over to Yilan.

Yilan held his gaze. She chewed methodically. Swallowed. “My family has a few _fangxiangshi_ up in the tree,” she said, deadpan. “Exorcism’s kind of a thing you just pick up.”

“Exorcism!” Yugi repeated, with a sort of joy that normal people found difficult to direct at ghosts. “I know a few exorcists! They’re all wonderful people, with their talismans and their fortune telling and penchant for collateral damage. I don’t know many Chinese exorcists, though.” He leaned forward, as innocent as a child, or as innocent as a shadow-demon child could be. “Do you really fly on swords?”

Yilan snorted. “Nobody’s dumb enough to lug a sword around in public nowadays. That’s _asking_ to get arrested. If you’re that desperate to get somewhere in a hurry, a pair of butter knives from over the counter works just fine.” She paused to reconsider her words. “Assuming you’re flying residential. High-rise buildings and near-sighted exorcists don’t go well together.”

“Would’ve never guessed,” Johanna muttered. 

“And you?” Yugi asked, swinging the entirety of his head to face Johanna. “Do you have any neat tricks up your sleeve?”

Johanna froze. This was the part where she’d make up a joke about being cursed as a child and having the occasional paranormal visitor in the early hours of the morning. This was also the part where she’d cite a lighthearted anecdote, like how she discovered her prowess in bar fights because said nightly visitors had taught her how best to break a chair over someone’s head. 

And if that someone didn’t have a head, then hitting it really hard with a sharp implement usually worked. That was the beauty of corporeal things: most of them tended to keel over when you stabbed them.

“Well,” Johanna began hesitantly, “every four generations in my family, someone comes down with the Sight.”

“The Sight,” Yugi repeated. He did that a lot, didn’t he? Almost as if putting it on his tongue and out his mouth made it tangible. 

Trying not to squirm, Johanna went on, “The usual case of seeing things that might be there, might not be there, might be here and there but also over there, but nobody over there can say yay or nay so most of the time you’re left taping salt blocks into your window frames.”

“And you can’t mix it up with sugar,” Yilan said severely. “Not unless you want to play flyswatter with a bunch of fey.”

“I didn’t realize,” said Yugi. He leaned forward, and an idea presented itself on his face. “How incredible! If you don’t mind my asking, how much can you see?”

“Most European things,” said Johanna. “Fey like to spook you when you’re taking a shower. Japanese things mostly keep to themselves, unless you forget your umbrella in a closet for a decade and it comes out with eyes and arms.”

Johanna paused. Yugi was looking a little over her shoulder with a faint smile, and it’s always worrying to watch someone’s attention be captured by something not necessarily of this mortal plane.

“Anyway, ghosts are pretty universal, what with the lingering regrets and the creepy vibes,” Johanna said, trying very hard not to peer over her shoulder. “Why?”

“Nothing much,” Yugi lied.

Johanna wished Yugi would go to more of an effort to sound convincing. It was the polite thing to do, she reasoned. Then again, Yugi seemed like the sort to continue on his merry, terrifying way, no matter how many people ran in the opposite direction screaming.

It was a certain kind of charm. Charisma, maybe. Madness, probably.

  


* * *

  


Ayagami was a town that was utterly unassuming. That is to say: it had hot springs, grocery stores that were only a little more overpriced than usual, a few ghosts here and there, and quaint little bakeries.

By unspoken small-town denizen law, ghosts are not to be spoken of. Partly because striking that match was a surefire way to earn the ire of every resident over the age of sixty, but mostly because ghosts get very annoyed very quickly if they catch you gossiping.

Yugi was not the sort of person to care. His common sense aligned with the universe in that it had hinges the right size stuck in all the wrong places.

Johanna felt this was a troublesome detail. But it _did_ make for unique content, and featuring a Duel Monsters champion was an easy way to slap a few links in a few descriptions. 

“Traces like these are signs that somebody’s been going to a shadow game spree,” said Yugi, with all the authority of someone who started and ended paranormal fistfights on a daily basis. “It’s really not something you like to see, especially in small towns. It’s... well, it’s as if an overzealous gambler walked into a casino and trashed the place.”

“Not a fan of ‘overzealous’,” said Yilan, from behind the camera.

“Me neither! Fortunately, it should be easy to track down our gambler friend. They don’t tend to be very subtle. I imagine leaving a pair of dice and a rigged deck out in the open would have them crawling out of the bushes.”

Johanna squinted at the alley wall Yugi was pointing at. There was... well, there had to be something there, right? He was making all these gestures and referencing some sort of trace of some sort of evil gaming that apparently made people go mad. Or lose their souls. Or get pitched into hell. It was all a little unclear, really.

“I’m not following why you think we’re tracking a... shadow gamer,” Johanna said, in a desperate bid for normalcy. “Even if— _hypothetically_ , if some evil witch was running around playing rigged games, what does an on-fire ghost care?”

“I imagine the on-fire ghost would be upset to be challenged,” Yugi answered, dreadfully calm, “only to have their eternal soul stolen. Or eaten. It depends on the weather, mostly.”

“So... forced servitude,” Yilan concluded. “In your ghostly afterlife. Great.”

“Indeed,” said Yugi. 

Surely Yilan captured, in perfect detail, Yugi’s vague motion against the wall, and the resulting eye of Horus that crawled out through a particularly wide gap. 

“Ah,” Johanna said, perhaps an octave higher. “Wow! That’s a neat trick!”

“I learned from the best,” Yugi said brightly. “ _Now_ you see. Yes?”

Johanna lifted her eyes again. 

A normal person, if equipped with a normal brain, would have probably fainted. It would be a mercy. Either that, or their brain would seep out of their ears, and then their entire psyche would shatter into pretty little flakes of incurable madness.

Nobody present could be considered normal, even under the most generous of conditions, and certainly all of them had been exposed to an amount of cosmic horrors most would consider unhealthy. 

Something deep, dark, and very, very evil writhed on the wall. It gave the impression that it had a human form but didn’t care much for maintaining it. Johanna counted four sets of teeth in her mute horror, all of which were gnashing violently, and if her Japanese was up to par—which she hoped it wasn’t—all the mouths were generous with expletives and cared little for who was on the receiving end.

“This,” Yugi said, resting a hand on what may have been a shoulder, “is a ghost that lost a game.”

“Jesus fucking _Christ_ ,” said Yilan, which was appropriate.

“I know,” Yugi agreed. “He’s got such a ghastly complexion!”

“Does he now,” Johanna muttered.

“Oh, yes. Goro-san tells me he had a very strict skincare regimen up until all his skin burnt off. Isn’t that right?”

The shadows writhed harder. It was distressing to witness. Between the ghost in the wall and the demon outside of it, Johanna’s brain was putting in some serious legwork, and she had the feeling something was going to leap out of the darkness with a large bat and an intent to break kneecaps.

“So,” Johanna tried, “angry ghosts are bad! Yes. Angry ghosts are bad. Evil gamblers are worse, but happen to be corporeal most of the time. So we just—” she made the universal gesture for _break a chair over their head_ and checked for confirmation.

Yugi brightened. “More or less! I’d expect to get thrown in a few games here and there, play for your life a few times.” He shrugged, as if everything he had said was well within the boundaries of sanity. “I’ll admit: it’s a bit annoying. If you can find a suitable chair, I won’t complain.”

“Right,” said Johanna. “A chair. A barstool, maybe. I’m good with barstools.”

“I should’ve brought the golf clubs,” Yilan mumbled. “Everybody knows evil gamblers aren’t scared of knives. They think it’s some type of parlour trick.” 

“I just hope they don’t like clowns,” Yugi said contemplatively, and didn’t elaborate.

The whole world had tilted a few degrees over. It wasn’t something you noticed until you went in with a protractor, or got hit with a Yugi. 

At least Goro-san was upset. Johanna wished she the ability to unhinge that hard. Life was difficult when you had the cognitive functions to think it through.

  


* * *

  


The hotel was on fire.

A few tiles from the roof came down through what was once the ceiling, all of which was burning, which consequently caught everything else on fire. Part of the street-facing wall caved inward, which was all very good, since Johanna was sat on her bed against the opposite wall.

She watched as smoke rolled against her feet, slow and thick, and also not real.

Johanna wasn’t an exciting person. She was an accounting major. She ran a Youtube channel in her free time. She was considering adding fanny packs to their merch line, if only to get in on the trend. She travelled with a DIY flyswatter that consisted of the hilt of a toy sword, a plastic fan, several warding talismans of Chinese origin, and a whole lot of duct tape. 

Johanna reached under her pillow. She pulled out the flyswatter and waited.

Waking up to find your room burning was, in most cases, high up on the list of unfortunate things to experience. Fortunately, Johanna had a litany of worse anecdotes involving things with eyes and teeth and sometimes a very raspy voice grabbing at her feet. Sometimes those things would be on fire, if they were feeling fancy.

Fire—fake fire, in this case—was normal by comparison. The only worrying part was which fancy-feeling monstrosity had decided to fake a fire, and if it had plans to eat anybody tonight. 

“Hello?” Johanna called out. “Can I help you with something?”

For a moment, there was silence. Then something responded: “Maybe.”

The voice was raspy, but didn’t carry the same threat of buzzsaw teeth that more fancy visitors sometimes did. “Great,” said Johanna, relieved. “Do you mind telling me, and maybe turning off the fire?”

“Can’t do anything about the fire,” said a figure, clambering through the window. They didn’t sound very sorry. A little smug, a lot annoyed, and generally horrifying. “Could go for a quick game, though.”

Johanna stared. In the back of her mind, Yugi’s smile lit up like a motion sensor, and something clicked into place. “Do you have any sort of interest in gambling?” she asked carefully.

“Not really,” said the figure. “But a bet’s a bet, no matter how you scam your way out of it.” 

Then they sat themselves down at the work desk. A haze of shadow filtered out any discernible features, which was unfortunate, because an easy way to tell how terrified one should be was by the number of eyes and sets of teeth something had. An even easier method was to see if they were smiling.

“That doesn’t sound very fair to me,” Johanna said, scanning for teeth. “You’ve got rules, regulations, courtesy, all that jazz. It’s not very nice to decide they stop existing once you start losing.”

“It isn’t,” the figure admitted, “but your opinions don’t matter much once you're dead.”

Johanna had to concede this was true. She tightened her grip on the flyswatter.

Big, Rude, and Ashen sounded like the kind of person who had a chronic and incurable case of the frownies. In the odd case they smiled, it was probably after something was bleeding or dead. The chair squealed in distress as they made themselves as comfortable as a burnt corpse could, but at the very least, they were less on fire than one would expect.

That was good. That was workable. It meant the chair was still intact, and if Johanna needed to, she could introduce her guest to the wonders of paranormal bar fights. 

“Alright,” Johanna said. “I’m the host of _Funky Ghouls_. Who’re you?”

“An employee at the clothing store a few blocks over,” said the figure. It paused. “You’re pretty cautious with your name, huh?”

“You learn a few things from spending your summers in Scotland,” Johanna said. 

“Not going to elaborate?”

“Don’t feel the need to. Besides, recent events have made me care a little more about who knows my name.”

“The tiny boy,” the figure said, lilting upward into a sneer. “The one who goes around calling himself _the King of Games_. Half of what he’s worth is bravado! The other half is _maybe_ luck, but probably hair!”

Johanna determinedly did not comment. “He’s sketchy and probably a demon, but I’ve met some demons who didn’t want to kill me before.” Here she left a meaningful pause, then went on: “Unlike some people.”

The figure snorted. “ _Please._ I don’t want to kill you. It might happen as a side effect, but that’s none of my business.”

Alright, Johanna thought. Clearly our morals are finding trouble aligning. That’s fine! I understand! Peeved ghosts don’t have to worry about dying twice. But, well, it’s fun to put them in their place anyway.

“Huh,” Johanna said. “No use wasting time, then. Shall we?”

The figure loomed forward. “You’ll play?”

“Sure. As long as I get to pick the game.”

It was incredible how shadow-ghost-monstrosities made it so obvious they were smiling without faces. “Alright,” said the figure. “I’m down for a... _heavier_ wager. Put your life on the table, and I’ll do the same.”

A normal person would escape out the window. A slightly more unhinged person would knock on Yugi’s door, three rooms down, and introduce him to tonight’s visitor.

But Johanna had experience. She had fast hands. She had the pride of every summer school student under her feet. 

She set the swatter on the table, then went rummaging in her backpack. The figure watched intently when she came back with a deck of playing cards.

“Ever play Spit?” Johanna asked.

  


* * *

  


_Spit, also referred to as Slam or Speed, is a game of the shedding family of card games for two players._

_The goal of the game is to get rid of all your cards as quickly as possible. The players do not take turns; physical speed and alertness are required to play faster than your opponent. On each round, by being first to play all your cards, you can reduce the number of cards you have in the next round. By winning several rounds, you can eventually get rid of all your cards, thereby winning the game._

_Spit is usually played on a table._

_A table is typically utilized alongside chairs._

  


* * *

  


“You’re _certain_ you outlined the rules properly?”

“For the last time, _yes_ ,” said Johanna. “Of course I did! Every single nuance! And the deck I used was perfectly legit! Do you seriously think I’m the type of person to cheat at something like Spit?”

Yugi’s expression was that of a skeptic, which was not appreciated. “And you made perfectly clear the part where you’re allowed to brain your opponent with a chair?”

“It’s in the name,” Yilan insisted. 

“It’s called _Spit_ ,” said Yugi.

“Yeah.”

There was a moment of uncomprehending silence. 

Johanna broke it down as gently as she could, seeing how it was barely dawn and Yugi gave off the impression that he wanted to smash in a window badly. 

“It’s called Spit,” she said, “and you’re supposed to slap the pile that has fewer cards. But sometimes you don’t feel like competing in that particular sport. Say, for example, when your opponent has hands the size of your torso and could slap your head off your neck if he sneezed wrong.”

“So you took a chair and smashed it over his head instead?” Yugi asked.

“He looked like he was about to sneeze,” Johanna said defensively. “Do _you_ want to know what the contents of my skull look like?”

“Depending on how many chairs you break this week, maybe,” said Yugi. He took a second to consider a terrible thought. “You don’t have a sort of... chair-homing ability, do you?”

“What? No!” Johanna said, baffled. “I have to go out of my way to find a chair if I want to bash someone with it.”

“The swatter works just fine, anyway,” Yilan added. When Yugi turned his unimpressed gaze to her, she bared her teeth in a feral grin. It was, by all definitions, disturbing. “You don’t get magical vermin in Japan? How lucky! Grab the swatter by the wrong end and you’re lucky if you wake up in your own body.”

Johanna presented the swatter to the room by holding it up triumphantly. Yugi’s expression rapidly cooled from disappointed to unnerved.

“Did you make that yourself?” he demanded. “Or—nevermind. How did you make that?” Nothing Yugi did was really inconspicuous—for someone barely five feet, he had the presence of a giant and also of a hardcore punk—but the careful step he took away from Johanna was almost subtle. 

That was neat, because it implied many horrible things about the swatter. With renewed sense, Johanna lowered her arm. “It’s just some dollar store toys and duct tape. Also a few sealing talismans.”

“A few?” Yugi repeated incredulously. “If you slapped a ghost with that, they would _explode_.”

Yilan beamed. “Isn’t it neat?” she said cheerily. “All they teach you at Saturday school is how to banish, how to seal, how to mix pigment, all that garbage. Turns out if you flip the script upside down and swap out the ink, spirits sometimes explode on contact!”

“But not usually,” Johanna hurried to say. “Only sometimes!”

“ _I_ would explode if you hit me with that,” Yugi said, with some offense.

Both Johanna and Yilan took a second to process the implications. Yugi had a way with words in that he didn’t need to use them at all to come off as an eldritch being, and when he did try them out, sane people would leap out the nearest window.

“Are _you_ a spirit?” Yilan asked.

“No, but I’ve got enough stuck on me that I don’t want to risk it,” said Yugi. He gave the swatter one last nervous look. “Do you mind putting that away?”

“Er—sure.” Johanna slipped the swatter into her backpack, shimmying it in as best she could. The handle stuck out very noticeably, but Johanna was very determined not to notice it. “Anyway, about this ‘shadow game’ you mentioned...”

  


* * *

  


Yugi considered himself a normal person. 

Normal people aren’t that interesting, right? Right. He wasn’t particularly interesting. Oh, he had fun stories, the typical pick of saving the world and travelling through time, but anyone could do that. It was just a matter of being unlucky enough, and possibly getting yourself possessed by an ancient Egyptian ghost.

And how hard was that, really? It was easier to manage by accident than on purpose, which is never a good thought to think.

I hope they don’t like clowns, thought Yugi, in the privacy of his own room. I _really_ hope they don’t like clowns.

Johanna seemed like a nice person. Yilan seemed like... well, Yilan seemed like the type of person to trust you as far as she could throw you, which was usually very far, and thus unfortunate because her trust-to-throw-distance ratio was anything but one-to-one.

That flyswatter, though. _God._ It took a diseased mind to come up with that sort of device. 

Yugi shivered. It was a good thing Johanna was in possession of the swatter. It very likely saved his life. Playing hopscotch over shadow games left a very distinct feel on a person, and the direction Yugi’s life liked to travel had him bleeding weird vibes. Approaching a swatter-armed Yilan the way Yugi had would have resulted in a lot more bleeding, a lot more literally.

It was nice to get away from life and into chaos, though. Life had rules. God, life had _rules_. So many of them, and it made for a terrible experience unless you knew how to play around them. But flat-out rule-breaking was a no-go unless you were in a hurry to have your soul condemned to a deep, dark, and worryingly damp place.

Life was like laser tag, except worse because there was no pizza party afterward. A game of laser tag, with heads running around in every direction and into walls, shooting wildly at anything that moved. They told you not to run and not to whack others over the head, but they never made it a rule to swear by. They told you to wear _running shoes_. 

Yugi was very good at laser tag. It was one of his many talents. That folder of talents, of which there was only one, was aptly named _games_. 

He was also very bad at life. Somewhere between laser tag and adult life was a hurdle that he had stumbled over. The rest of the world was running forward with reckless abandon, and he was still putting his teeth back into place. 

But Yugi made the best of it. He tried to learn. He really did! It just wasn’t a great feeling when you realized the moral of the story was _the world will keep turning even in your grief and one day you’ll have to catch up._

Stumbling blindly through life was scary. Yugi desperately missed being scared with someone.

There was a knock at his door. “Yugi?” said Johanna’s voice. “Are you ready to go?”

Yugi stared at the door. Then he stared at his hands. 

There was something very strange going on in this town. One could make an argument that it was evil, dark, and mysterious. One could make a _very_ convincing argument not to get involved and hurry on to wherever Kaiba’s next marketing campaign was.

All my life I’ve wanted friends, Yugi thought, but I’ve never had much practice making them myself.

“Yugi?” Johanna’s voice was wary. Yugi could sense the flyswatter through the door. “Are you good?”

“I’m just perfect,” said Yugi. He grabbed his jacket and settled his emotions. When he opened the door, Johanna blinked once in surprise, and by the second time she had slipped on a neutral expression. 

“Alright,” said Johanna. “You down for a walk in the park?”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“Yilan’s already there, so yeah, I’d say so.” There was a careful pause. “Unless you’re not feeling it?”

“Oh no, I could use an early morning walk,” said Yugi. “Stretch the limbs, refresh the mind, spy a few ghosts. Right?”

“Right,” Johanna agreed. 

Whatever had been on Yugi’s face was probably worth being embarrassed about. Johanna bulldozed over this fact by insisting that the weather was so incredibly intense, a whole ten degrees more than she was used to back in Canada, over there we have four whole seasons and two of them take up the entire year, and did you have breakfast yet? 

Johanna and Yilan were strange and potentially lethal. But they had good intentions, which was a lot more than Yugi could say for some of his early friendships. 

As an added bonus, because Yugi had been good this year, neither of them cared about his career. It was oddly cathartic.

“I think I could go for a coffee,” he finally said. 

Johanna’s smile was perfectly and purposely ignorant.

  


* * *

  


It was tragically difficult to find benches outside convenience stores in Japan. Ayagami, however, continued in its endeavour to reject normality by installing peeling, sun-faded benches outside the local Familymart. 

Either the anomaly had carved out a significant portion of reason and physics out of the world, or Yugi had a knack for generating liminal spaces whenever his mind drifted, because reality had called in for a lunch break and locked the doors behind it.

Johanna sat quietly and picked at the peeling paint. The action made her more certain of where her body began and ended.

So banished souls waddle off to hell when their heads break a chair, she thought to herself. That was an interesting fact. It was a fact she could’ve lived her life without knowing, but an interesting one nonetheless. 

Yugi chewed monotonously through his sandwich. He was staring at the ground like melancholic reflection was a medical diagnosis, which, uh—which it probably was, actually. Bad simile. Either way, it was clear that something about convenience store ham and cheese had ejected his mind into a neighbouring dimension.

Who was Johanna to judge, anyway? Life was one of those things you had to take care of before it took care of you. If you didn’t want your mistakes bleeding over all your nice sheets, you had to go in with a magic eraser and terminate with extreme prejudice. 

Sometimes you had to fight for a chair without even knowing _why_ , and if you were lucky, the backdrop would be one of musical chairs instead of a violent bar fight. 

Yugi seemed like the kind of person who magnetically attracted blunt objects to the head, both literally and metaphorically. It was always better for that particular quirk to be literal, Johanna thought. The hands gripping the chair tended to belong to a body that, if stabbed, quickly fled to the emergency room. How was someone supposed to fight against a metaphorical chair? Life was so unfair sometimes.

“So! Shadow games,” Johanna began, determinedly chipper. 

Yugi blinked his way back to reality. “Shadow games,” he said happily. “They’re a bit of a conundrum, aren’t they? I’m really glad that neither of you dissolved into tears or came at me with a knife when I broke the news to you.”

“Does that happen often?”

“Often enough for me to stand at the opposite end of a room while I’m giving my lecture. Was there something you didn’t understand?”

“Not particularly.” Johanna gripped her existential dread by the nape and held tight. “Well... now that you mention it, there _was_ a little something that was bothering me.”

“And what was that?”

“I mean, after you gave that rundown, I couldn’t help but be curious,” said Johanna. “Yilan’s family goes on yearly exorcism road trips, and she’s never had to infinite combo somebody into the, um—“

“The shadow realm?” Yugi suggested.

“The shadow realm. And I’m not trying to discredit you!” Johanna added hurriedly. “You, uh… you have a very charismatic aura about you, what with the whole—” Here she made a gesture that was probably less illustrative that she thought, but it was the effort that counted, and Johanna put in a lot of effort into not dying. “The whole eye of Horus thing, and also your shadow. Which is still pointing the wrong direction, by the way.”

Yugi’s shadow mirrored his smile: wide and feral and deeply disturbing. “Oh, have we reached that point in our relationship? That’s great! I was wondering when we were going to stop ignoring it.”

“Sometimes you have to rush through matters,” said Johanna.

“Mm, that’s true,” Yugi said pleasantly. He peered down at his shadow. His shadow peered back. He notably did not answer the question.

It was kind of the powers that be to toss in a punk Peter Pan with the rest of the on-fire, vengeful spirits. A rural town doesn’t do so well while hosting a supernatural house party (gladiator-style duel to the death), but it sure gets a lot more colourful. 

On any other day, Johanna would get her daily workout by repeatedly bringing down her stainless steel water bottle on the nearest demonic entity. Fortunately, if Yugi _was_ a demon, he was very bad at being bad. 

“I’m going to guess that you’ve had a fair share of horror stories involving shadow games,” Johanna said, figuring that statement was safe enough. 

“Oh, _so_ many,” Yugi said. “I was a very troubled senior high student. Bullies enjoyed my company. I was very sad not to reciprocate their feelings.”

Johanna winced. Hope was a cruel thing. “That’s... rough.”

“Very much so!” Yugi went on, entirely unbothered. “But it was handled, don’t worry. I made friends, and thank goodness for them, because I shiver to think what would have become of everything if the powers of friendship and basic human decency had eluded me.”

Putting two and two together was an art of subtlety. Johanna’s face betrayed nothing, which also betrayed everything. “Do I want to know what happened to your bullies?”

“ _I_ still don’t know what happened to some of them,” said Yugi.

“Moving on then!” Johanna declared, with cheer thumping at the gates of reason. “You said shadow games demand collateral. I don’t claim to be an expert on vengeful ghosts with a penchant for gambling, but isn’t it a bit odd for my very real, very tangible life to weigh the same as a very dead, very terminal life?”

“Despite what one might assume, ghosts have a lot to lose.” Yugi’s eyes went foggy again, and it was the sort of fog that swallowed up your high beams and bounced them back at you. “The prospect of an afterlife isn’t as comforting as it seems while you’re alive. The more time you spend in the world of the living, the less you want to be evicted to the world of the dead. It’s all a matter of preference, really. But those preferences can be powerful.”

Johanna decided not to ask if Yugi had any personal experiences with evicting ghosts. “I see,” was all she could muster.

The two of them sat in contemplative, nervous silence. In the manner of someone waiting for the other shoe to drop, Johanna stared resolutely at the ground and away from any shadows. Yugi returned to methodically chewing his sandwich. 

“I see you’ve started a stint of existential dread,” said Yilan’s voice, in its trademarked irritated lilt, “and you didn’t even invite me.”

“It was an unplanned session,” Yugi said, in good and very fake spirits. 

He gave Yilan one of his weird smiles, which she returned with mild skepticism and a small scowl. Ah, that was good—it meant she was slowly moving from all-out hostility to grudging acceptance. Johanna relaxed, content in the lowering probability of a supernatural fistfight, and settled for passively nodding as Yilan sat down beside Johanna and began recounting her walk.

“So while you two were chatting it up over breakfast,” Yilan said, giving Yugi’s sandwich a sharp look, “I scouted out the park. The lighting shouldn’t be too hard to work around, but I hope you have waterproof mascara.”

“Always,” said Yugi, to nobody’s surprise.

“As for the ghosts—” Yilan’s face did the thing it liked to do when it was met with a problem not easily solved by exploding talismans. “Well, I sure felt someone try to set me on fire, but they stopped when I threatened to string them up with their own intestines.”

“Most people would, no?”

“Yeah, but these are _ghosts_ ,” Yilan insisted. “Angry, on-fire ghosts forced into gamer servitude. Where’s the anger? The resentment? The whole ‘I’ve been fermenting in my own misery for the past _n_ years and watching everyone live their lives to the fullest while I spiritually rot is making me super duper pissed’ spiel?” In that sentence was a lot more emotional availability than Yilan typically allowed. To compensate, she went on, “Besides, the last ghoul I tried that line on reacted by going after my face with knife hands and a whole lot of attitude.”

An emotion somewhere between surprise and disturbed acceptance manifested itself on Yugi’s face. “Did that ghoul explode?”

“You learn quickly,” Yilan said, satisfied. 

“Oh, it was just a guess,” Yugi lied. “In any case, are you alright? I imagine being set on fire isn’t a pleasant experience.”

“I said they tried,” Yilan said irritably. “I never said they succeeded. Either they’re terrified or they're furious, but I’d wager to say they’re both. We already know why they’re angry, even though it’s a stupid reason, because ghosts operate off a version of common sense several psychotic breakdowns removed from ours. As for why they’re scared—” 

“The gambler,” Yugi put in.

The look Yilan gave him was positively scathing. “Sure,” she allowed, the same way she would let an imp holler for a while before twisting its head off. “But the thing about ghosts is they just love to talk. Talk, talk, talk, oh _boy_ , they ever shut up.”

Yugi listened with a serene expression. Johanna, on the other hand, leaned forward in case that somebody’s teeth introduced themselves to someone else’s neck. 

“You know what they all said?” Yilan went on. “It was hard to catch over the screaming and general nonsense, but all of them had a lot to say about the King of Games.” 

Half bravado and half luck-slash-hair, Johanna thought. 

Yilan thankfully remained seated, expelling her energy through sharp gestures instead. “And they were scared witless! Not that they had any wits to begin with, but you should’ve seen how scared they were of being ‘privately escorted to hell by means of the most humiliating punishment the devil could dream up, except ten times worse, because it’ll be thematically appropriate’. What the fuck is that about?”

Laughing was not the most sensible reaction, so Yugi proceeded to do it. “Was that really what they said?” he asked, through bright, shiny teeth. “Word for word, exactly that?”

Yilan considered him for a moment, possibly to determine how much _he_ would talk as a ghost. Then she said: “I think I might punch you.”

_“No punching,”_ Johanna said firmly. “No talismans, no glowing golden sigils, no supernaturally-backed brawls. _No,_ ” she repeated, when Yilan reached for her back pocket. “We can discuss this like civilized people who believe in the goodness of the human heart as well as the deep, horrifying darkness underneath it.”

“He’s either a demon or a monster who needs to be exorcised immediately,” Yilan said pointedly.

“That’s not true,” Yugi said, with some offense. “As I was saying to Johanna, I went through a very strange series of events in senior high. I would go so far as to say they changed me irrevocably as a person and forced me to work through problems I’m not entirely grateful for, but happy to have experienced if only as a byproduct of happier times.”

Yilan’s hostility died a sudden death. She eased into an impromptu ceasefire by studying Yugi with healthy concern disguised as deep irritation. 

“What went on with you?” Yilan asked. Before Yugi could fire off another vague story, she snapped, “Stop trying to mystify your way out of this. Did some... amicable genie slap your life into place? Three wishes and _poof_ , just like that?”

Yugi froze. His sandwich also died a sudden death by way of Sudden Statement Causing Incredible Alarm. 

There was a whole lot of surface area for fire, and not a lot of space for batting it out. Johanna slowly shifted away from Yugi, prepared for the worst even though she had no concept of what the worst could be.

“That,” Yugi finally said, “was an incredible guess.”

“It was actually a genie?”

“No. Not quite. I’d say ghost would be a more accurate term, although there were some strong genie elements in there.”

Somewhere in the strange space that was this conversation, a bridge had been laid out between present and past, then promptly set on fire. The problem was that Yugi was stuck on the opposite shore, and he was waving at them cheerily as the metaphor smoldered.

“Can I offer my unprofessional opinion?” Johanna said delicately.

Yugi sighed, presumably because it was a question he received often. “Be my guest.”

“Well, I think it’s fine to grieve,” Johanna went on. She kept a close eye on Yugi’s shadow. “Not to say I’m an expert on the topic or anything, but... I mean, nobody moves through life completely alone. Right? Even if you’re hiding in the furthest corner of the room, someone’s bound to ask you what’s going on eventually.” Here Johanna spread her hands placating. “The whole world moves at once, altogether. You can burn a bridge, and sometimes you really _should_ burn that bridge, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t rebuild that bridge, especially when you think it might be a good idea, but the people on the other side of the river are going a bit too hard for you to swallow, so you check further downstream and over _there_ you find people who aren’t all gung-ho about making their dreams come true and living the best of their bestest lives but are just waiting for their ice cubes to freeze and their tea to steep over a good book or two, and sometimes it’s _that_ sort of reprieve you need, the kind that distracts you but doesn’t let you give up on crossing altogether because this planet is _weird_ and life is _even weirder_.”

Johanna took a deep, vaguely screeching breath. The mania drained out of her hands first, and she slapped her knees gamely. 

“So!” Johanna declared. “Bridges! Almost as good as chairs. Nice to meet you, Yugi. I’m Johanna.”

With the tone of someone familiar with Johanna’s Occasional Outbursts, Yilan said, with deep satisfaction, “Nice.”

Yugi’s melancholy had been forcibly replaced with surprise, and he demonstrated this abrupt change by squinting at Johanna. “Hello?” he said, uncertain. “It’s... nice to meet you? And if you could remind me again why we’re introducing ourselves, I’d appreciate it.”

“It’s safe to say that our first impressions of one another were abysmal,” said Johanna. “I’m not saying we lied to each other, but we definitely played hopscotch across landmines, and that’s not regulation. So: I’m Johanna! Nice to meet you. I was born with the Sight and sometimes I fistfight fey.”

Delicately, with noticeable wariness, Yugi shook Johanna’s outstretched hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said. “Can I ask when you started filming?”

Johanna turned to Yilan, who held her camera high and proud. 

“We have an outtakes segment specifically for Johanna’s Occasional Outbursts,” Yilan said primly. “I felt one coming.”

“Oh,” said Yugi. 

“And,” Yilan continued, sticking a hand out as well, “I’m Yilan, exorcist by impulse. I’m stubborn by nature and suspicious by trade. Doesn’t mean I don’t like you; just means I’m trying to figure you out.”

Yugi accepted her hand. He did so slowly, as if expecting to be disemboweled. “It’s nice to meet you too,” he decided.

There was a moment of expectant silence.

And then Yugi sighed. His entire form—which wasn’t a lot, really—deflated like a sad balloon. “Oh, very well. I’m Yugi. I was... possessed by an ancient Egyptian spirit for two years, won several titles in body but not in mind, grew to consider him my most precious person, and personally escorted him to the afterlife.”

Johanna blinked. Then she blinked again, for good measure. 

That was the sort of thing that seriously wrecked your emotions, yes? Loving a ghost was always a dangerous thing to do because the very act ensured its impermanence, no? 

“I think that explains a lot,” Johanna said, feeling oddly numb, “but I’m not sure what I think right now. I think I ought to be surprised.”

Meanwhile, Yilan’s face bunched up around her nose. “Man,” she said. “That sucks.”

_“God,”_ Yugi said. He buried his face in the hand free of ham and cheese, silently but efficiently reshelving the many emotions that Johanna and Yilan had hurled off the shelves. “You two have a talent for prying me open.”

“It’s not just you, don’t worry,” Yilan assured him. “It was bound to happen eventually. It’s the magic of the show.”

Johanna was tempted to say: no, for once, it probably isn’t the magic of the show. It’s probably the magic of the town, or the evil gambler inside the town, or the many angry gamer ghosts also inside the town.

She kept her thoughts to herself to preserve the sanctity of the moment. “Well, we’ve loitered long enough,” she said, swiping peeled paint off her skirt as she stood. “How about we take a walk? Tango with a few ghosts, maybe?”

Nothing Yugi did was subtle. As such, Johanna, Yilan, and the camera all caught his sigh of relief as he tossed the remains of his sandwich in the bin and pulled up his game face. 

This was the Yilan Effect in play: sometimes you worried that your friends could split your head open if you moved too suddenly, and that was when you knew them. Imagine how those same friends appeared to their enemies.

“Tangoing with ghosts sounds pretty good right about now,” Yugi said. His smile was small, sly, and very, very sharp. “A bit of normality is nice every once in a while.”

  


* * *

  


Yilan was the sort of person to approach most problems with a large hammer and a lot of spite. 

She knew it, Johanna knew it, their subscribers knew it, and anyone who earned her ire _really_ knew it. Oftentimes they felt it too, but those situations were rare. People came equipped with ancient animal instinct; it was the little voice in your head that told you to run when someone approached you with a blunt object and a blank smile. 

That little voice was Yilan’s friend. It kept people away from her. All she needed to tell it was something along the lines of _I will brutalize you so that every mirror to suffer your reflection will instantly shatter_ , and the little bodies in which the little voices resided would turn on their heels and leave without a word.

Johanna was one of the strange people to have been born without a little voice. She supplemented by using her own voice, which was effective up until something came at her swinging and there was a chair in reach. 

Up until now, Yilan had been content to accept Johanna as a horrifying anomaly. An accounting major with the Sight and a penchant for turning preternatural guests into splatters on a wall? Now _that_ was worth investigating.

The Yinhe Song clan had a tendency to take in strays. Yilan was... slightly ashamed to have fallen into the same hole. It was instinct! Johanna had seemed like such an innocent, naive thing! Besides, she was interesting, tolerated Yilan’s hobbies with extreme patience, and was willing to throw down with ghosts. 

So Yilan had given Johanna a few talismans. For protection, obviously. The best way to protect yourself was to make sure anything that wanted you dead was in too many pieces to go ahead with that plan. 

But then Johanna had come back with the flyswatter. Oh _god_ , the flyswatter. 

Obviously it was a monstrosity and needed its own exclusion zone, but at the same time... well, it made spirits explode. Violently. Like fireworks, but with more screaming. 

The more potent the tools, the more terrifying their wielders. This held true for every aspect of life. Johanna had yet to recognize this, and perhaps it was for the better, because she took pride in being the normal one.

Normal was in the eye of the beholder. If Johanna was as weird as humans could get, then the world probably wouldn’t blow itself apart.

But then Yugi had marched off the train, introduced himself in the most suspicious way possible, and sheepishly presented the metaphorical burns that going in too hard, too fast with a metaphorical magical eraser had gotten him.

And what the hell was Yilan supposed to do with that? 

Yugi was a... walking, talking, magnet for evil things. He _leaked_ creepy vibes. Standing next to him was the equivalent of being pitched into a haunted house with the added disadvantage that you couldn’t burn the whole place to the ground. 

And that wasn’t it! _That was nowhere near it._ Someone as menacing as Yugi was bound to drop shadows out their ears every time they went over a speed bump, right?

Yugi didn’t. And he wouldn’t. Because it was obvious he wasn’t any sort of progenitor of evil things, or caller of dark monstrosities. 

He carried himself with all the dignity of a malevolent warlock, but his face gave it away. It took a while to decipher—those belts and chains swayed the mind toward a higher-end strand of death metal—but easy acceptance and passive terror were signs of a person who was very, very unlucky.

So far the evidence aligned as follows: Yugi had gone through a rough patch in high school. Then he got himself possessed. Presumably his bullies disappeared during this time, he made some friends, gave his heart a few too many rounds in a particularly rough washing machine, and now he was here.

In Ayagami, hunting for ghosts, while a very successful career waited for him several hundred kilometers away. 

So he had been taught by a ghost how to trip face-first into shadow games, all while possessing the skill to end them. 

King of Games, indeed. 

“While screaming isn’t particularly supernatural,” Johanna went on to the camera, “ghostly apparitions burning alive isn’t too uncommon of an occurrence, reportedly.”

“I hear it’s become part of local life,” Yugi said, gesturing vaguely at the park around them. “Which is interesting, because it says a lot about what local life is like. Then again, Ayagami is a small town, so perhaps I’m extrapolating too much from big-city life.”

Johanna offered him a sideways grin. “A few too many run-ins with people toppling backwards out of a bar have swayed your opinion, has it?”

“Oh, it’s not the people falling out of a bar that concern me,” said Yugi. “It’s the ones tossing them bodily through the window that I keep an eye out for. I feel like I would make for a very good projectile.”

He was right. And if anyone knew it, Yilan did. Not only because she herself could toss Yugi well over the Ayagami Station sign, but also because one tended to become very aware of height discrepancies when manning the camera.

“So we’ve established that somebody’s been going around riling up these already very riled-up ghosts, which makes our job difficult, but should result in some excellent footage,” Johanna told the camera. The side of her mouth that had been dragging crept steadily upward. “Still not ideal for us, of course. We condemn violence and believe it to be entirely unnecessary in our quest for the truth.”

“Unless a ghost comes at us with a flaming club,” Yilan put in.

“A fair point,” Johanna agreed. “We would be very sad if a ghost tried to assault us with an on-fire implement. In which case you have to ask yourself, ‘Are my morals so firm that I’m willing to bleed brains out of my nose to stand by them?’ Oftentimes you’ll decide the answer is _no_ , either because your survival instinct has hijacked the wheel, or because standing up after getting hit really hard over the head is an easy way to communicate that you want to get hit again. This is a very normal reaction! As it turns out, you can only lose your life twice, but the first is always fatal.”

“At least there’s some flex room,” Yugi said sunnily. 

“But if you need that flex room, it means you probably died horribly, so let’s all try to keep our entrails where they belong,” said Johanna. She turned to the camera again, directing an authoritative gesture toward their future audience. “Everything we’re doing is dangerous, so if you’re watching this at home and suspect that your residence might be haunted, please contact an exorcist.”

“And if someone challenges you to a game in a dark alley, running will net you the highest likelihood of survival.”

Johanna and Yugi nodded in the manner of licensed professionals offering unto the world their professional advice. Half their viewers thought it was satire, and the other half needed to pay close attention to the disclaimers at the beginning of their videos.

The banter went on for a little longer, with town lore and urban myths sprinkled in occasionally. Yilan had to give it to Yugi: he had presence. His very existence meant that somebody was looking at him, and they were always looking intently. 

He also countered Johanna’s somewhat unhinged camera personality with ease, which, considering his long history of apparently lethal duels, hinted at what sort of people he considered his rivals. 

“And that’s a wrap,” Johanna finally said, gently dabbing at her forehead with a handkerchief. She sighed a long, damp sigh. “Can we grab lunch? I’d love a blast of AC to the face right now.”

“That would be nice,” Yugi said, visibly less sticky. Some kind of sorcery kept him dry and cool even in a navy blue dress shirt and tight black pants, and it was a kind of sorcery Yilan wanted to learn badly.

But it could wait. Japanese summers were _brutal_. “The curry shop has AC,” said Yilan.

The curry shop owner seemed elated to host them again. Their presence was probably the most exciting thing to happen to Ayagami since the ghosts went haywire, which was hardly an upgrade, but at least none of them went around threatening to kill people with a stack of Uno cards. 

Shadow games. _Ugh._ So convoluted and roundabout. Where were the good old days of ghouls hacking people to death? The aftermath was a bit rough to swallow for newbies, sure, but it was all about character development! A bit of blood made for a will and a stomach of steel. A good tutor would pat you on the back and hand you a half-decent mop, and that was all you really needed in life.

It was traditional, dishonest work, and only required the presence of an exorcist, a detective, and a coroner, two of which you paid under the table. Everything went sideways when you opened the door to a weekend convention pass and a pair of clown shoes.

If some card-counting ghost managed to get Yilan, how was she supposed to face her ancestors? She’d shuffle in quietly and they’d all gather around and say, oh, Yilan, you had a good run, didn’t you? What was your greatest achievement? An... exploding flyswatter? A Youtube channel? And you say that you died over a game of _Gong Zhu?_ My god, Yilan, if I had a cow I would cast your dishonour over it and it would immediately shrivel up and die. 

It was a truly terrible thought. 

“You’re playing _Gong Zhu_ with me later,” Yilan demanded, pointing her spoon in the general direction of her travelling companions.

Yugi blinked. He was halfway to a smile, so he kicked up the creep and made it a full one. “That’s the Chinese variant of Hearts, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s like Hearts, but with point values.”

“Now _that_ I can work with.”

“Don’t toot your own horn too fast, resident champion and sitter-in-throne-of-games,” Johanna warned. She pointed her spoon back at Yilan with narrowed eyes. “To know how to play _Gong Zhu_ is to be raised in a Chinese family whose sole purpose in life is to destroy your faith in top-decking. It’s practically hazing.”

“It’s not my fault your family was all genteel and hand-holdy,” Yilan said. “Well, Yugi? Feel like bashing your head against a wall for a bit?”

“Oh, yes! Though I’m not certain that it’ll be _my_ head against the wall.”

“And,” Johanna interjected, “you need four players. I’ll do us all a favour and play since I have no pride and accept fate as it comes. So who’s the last chair?”

Yilan gave Johanna a blank stare. It was a blank stare that was full of words, most of them forming what one could call bad ideas, but creating content was nothing if not a cesspool of bad ideas. 

Johanna’s expression soured until it finally broke. She threw up her hands. “Fine! _Fine._ I’ll go... I’ll go find a practice ghost or something, I don’t know.” 

Unsurprisingly, Yugi pushed himself off the counter and waddled after her. “I’ll supervise,” he said, which in theory was reassuring, but in practice meant that two chaos magnets were going on a late night stroll. In a haunted town full of evil, on-fire ghosts. With an evil gambler wizard peeping on the show.

Yeah. They'd be fine.

Yilan gave a little shrug with her hands. “You do you. Good luck.”

Yugi gave her a cheerful wave, whereas Johanna opted for directing a hard glare at the world and pulling out her flyswatter. Briefly, for a tiny, fleeting moment, Yilan wondered what sort of horrors Yugi’s death duels and Johanna’s chair magnetism could cause. It was like parking a coal truck next to a house fire, yes? Or striking a match in a vat of natural gas? But that was the sort of thought that couldn’t be thoughted if you wanted to maintain some semblance of faith in humanity, or in the fabric of reality.

Best leave devils to do what devils do best. That was what Yilan was here for: going in afterward with a mop, a lot of bleach, and a sturdy bucket in case anything twitched.

  


* * *

  


“You know, ever since meeting you, I feel like I’ve been attracting a lot more trouble than usual,” Johanna mused aloud.

“That tends to happen around me,” Yugi said apologetically. “I’m really sorry about all this. I’ve come to accept that the universe has crosshairs trained on me especially.”

He lifted his hand to bat some... giant shadow bug... out of the air. Or at least it seemed like a bug. The high-pitched screaming made Johanna a little unsure, but she had heard stranger things scream before. No matter the shape, form, or nervous system, most things reacted to blunt force trauma by method of extreme distress. 

The bug reacted accordingly and exploded violently on contact with Yugi’s palm, which was also swarming with shadows.

Johanna ducked on instinct. The action turned out to be a wise one, given little bits of squealing flesh rocketed in every direction. All of them missed Yugi.

A splotch of miscellaneous black gunk nestled itself against Johanna’s skirt. She performed a controlled panic-dance to dislodge it. “Well, I don’t know about all that!” she said. “But I do know that the universe is always out for people who see more than they should, because then you start to see the cracks, and god only knows what happens if you go in with a chisel.”

“Tell me about it,” Yugi muttered to himself, in the tone of someone who is always armed with a chisel.

“And, ah, not to go off-topic, but how much longer are we supposed to have bugs rammed in our faces for?”

“I believe we should be done. Well, that’s what I’d say if I’d been manually hurling flesh-eating shadow bugs at impervious targets for an hour. Yamamoto-san appears to lack both the experience and the humility to concede, though I applaud his stamina.” Yugi turned his tremendously feral smile toward an unseen spectator. “Did you hear that, Yamamoto-san? I can clap for you, if you’d like.”

Something screeched back in rage. The sound might have been produced by a human, or something with human vocal chords, but it had a certain quality that suggested the easiest way to make it stop screaming was to remove it from existence.

Johanna tightened her grip on the flyswatter. 

Yugi, a man of his word, began clapping. His face betrayed nothing. “Well _done_ , Yamamoto-san, very well done,” he said. “I must commend your vocabulary as well. It’s not every day you meet someone with such a vast arsenal of insults.”

“Though if he calls me a ‘pasty flour-faced tar-blooded witch’ again I might remove the organ that supplies those insults,” said Johanna.

“Yes, and that would be very tragic. I know a few college students and back-alley bars that would love to get their hands on furnishings before you.” Here Yugi cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “What do you say, Yamamoto-san?”

_“Stay still so I can kill you,”_ something terrible and primal howled.

“Engineers have such poor communication skills,” said Yugi. “Oh well. Johanna, if you could take a few steps back...?”

Curious Johanna might have been, but stupid she was not. Hurriedly, with great care to avoid any squishy puddles on the ground, Johanna retreated a good five meters.

“A little further back,” Yugi suggested, and turned his glowing eyes at something unseen. 

Glowing eyes were always a bad sign, Johanna decided. It didn’t matter if they lit up like glow sticks or stuck the sun inside your retinas. The fact of the matter was that something always had to be behind the glow, be it post-spell inflammation or a creative curse or bits of ancient Egyptian spirit that wouldn’t come out in the wash. Glowing eyes meant something was there and didn’t care if you knew it or not.

Yugi was the least subtle person Johanna had ever met. He had a kind of authority about him, likely from the many absurdities he had to explain to hyperventilating bystanders. Something told Johanna he hadn’t been born with it—the way he stood and smiled and spoke was comfortable, but in a way leather pants are comfortable after a couple weeks of violent swearing and tugging.

In that brain was a hamster wheel and that hamster was a marathon champion. The hamster might have also had rabies, but Johanna was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Something out in the haze of shadows made a quiet but wet splat. The noise was one of _those_ noises—the kind which doesn’t get any better with context, but at least saves you the trauma of suddenly stumbling over whatever had happened. And the suggestion was that something had happened. Johanna felt safe in betting that something might have been fatal twice over. 

Johanna’s face went through an elaborate series of emotions, disgust being at the forefront. “Please tell me we’re done.”

“We should be,” said Yugi. He blinked his eyes rapidly, as if attempting to dislodge a stray hair. His eyes dimmed substantially. Perhaps he blinked too rapidly, too furiously, but with hair like his, you could never really know. “Now, I don’t mean to come off as overly threatening or suspicious, but are you showing any symptoms of a really bad sunburn?”

“No?” Johanna said. She patted herself down once her hands stopped shaking. “No, I’m alright. Don’t give me that look! I’ve got dreary moorland-denizen blood in my veins. I know what a sunburn feels like, okay?”

“If you say so,” Yugi said. 

“You are so _rude_ sometimes,” Johanna said. She rounded on him accusingly when he tried to sidestep away. “And don’t even think about trying that trick with Yilan around! The last guy who claimed to see the face of god—I don’t know how much he was seeing by the end since the police report said he’d been—anyway, don’t flash your high beams at Yilan, okay? She has a wicked roundhouse. If your neck’s made of fragile stuff, it’ll come right off.”

Yugi’s face was carefully calm, but the way his eyes were moving implied that he was envisioning his neck popping off like a champagne cork, and that the image made him ill at ease. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  


* * *

  


Gong Zhu _is a Chinese four-player trick-taking card game, and is the Chinese version of the game Hearts. It differs from the standard Hearts game by assigning point values to cards. The objective is to score positive points and avoid penalty points._

_All players start with 0 points. The goal is to not be the first to go past -1000 points, thereby losing the game. The loser(s) become the pig, as_ Gong Zhu _means “chase the pig” in Chinese. All points accumulate until any player(s) have lost, for which the game ends and all points will be reset to 0._

_One could say that an all-out, card-based, four-player game with point values was a surefire way to earn the ire of every player very quickly._

_But then you would have to say that to Seto Kaiba, and the only person who could pay you enough to say that to his face was, coincidentally, Seto Kaiba._

  


* * *

  


“How are you so _good_ at this _fucking_ game?”

“You know, I get asked that a lot,” Yugi said pleasantly. He watched Yilan shuffle the cards with a smile that would’ve fit better on someone meant to put a noose around your neck. 

Yilan glared back, fire in her eyes and especially in her mind. She let loose a long chain of very bad words before cutting the deck with a lot more force than strictly necessary. It was likely she was imagining cutting something else, like a throat. “King of Games _my ass_. You and your fucking... _omnipotence_ and _godlike luck_. I bet you took every stats class in high school, you— _crime against nature_.”

“I did take stats in senior high, yes,” Yugi said. “That was a very good guess! You’re really good at guessing, Yilan. Has anyone ever told you that?”

Johanna watched with morbid fascination as Yilan took a deep breath. It wasn’t the sort of calming, internal-mantra-reciting breath. It was a very physical, very preparatory breath that informed the body that somebody was going to be unconscious on the floor shortly. 

Reflexively, Johanna wrenched the cards from Yilan’s hands and put herself between the mauler and the maulee. 

Yugi looked up at where Johanna was now seated on the table. “Is this the part where you tell me to shut up?”

“If you keep pretending like half your prowess isn’t in bravado I might deck you myself,” Johanna told him.

“That’s fair,” said Yugi. And wasn’t that neat? Yugi knew exactly how his competences were distributed, which by all accounts should’ve made him an arrogant bastard. But no: he was fiercely humble under all those belts and shadows. 

The shit-talking was something special, though. It was like being complimented and slapped across the face at once. The brain simply stopped working in the face of Yugi’s cheerful banter.

“That was a challenge,” Yilan said, visibly manic. She rose out of her chair like an avenging angel puppeteered by the hand of god. “That was a challenge, right? Johanna, you heard that. Wasn’t that a challenge?”

“I think we should all be good and go to bed,” Johanna said firmly.

Yamamoto-san raised a hand. He’d recovered some of his colour over the course of the night, which was to say he was pale, gaunt, and literally ashen, but at least now he was in one piece. “Can I go now?” he asked miserably. 

In her heart Johanna felt a little pity. Half of what had been missing from his body had been flyswatter-inflicted, and by extension, blown to bits. She wasn’t sure how to feel, and while she was pondering over whether or not to apologize to a homicidal ghost, Yugi made a firm but dismissive gesture. 

“You can go,” he told Yamamoto-san. There was a pause, and then he added: “No more games. _No more bugs._ Or else Yilan here might have to come after you, which I can guarantee is terrifying regardless of whether you’re alive or dead. Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” Yamamoto-san said, no less miserable than he’d been since they dragged him back to their hotel. “No games, no bugs, no... freaky exorcist girls.”

In a rather comical _poof_ , Yamamoto-san disappeared. His despairing frown didn’t actually linger where he sat, but the tension in the room made the idea a lot more substantial.

“Anyway!” Johanna said loudly. “What a game! What a game. You got enough practice, right, Yilan?”

“Practice _losing_ , yeah,” Yilan said venomously.

“People tend to get in a lot of practice losing when they play against me,” Yugi said, which was unhelpful. He smiled sunnily. “Did you at least pick up a few... mm, subtleties, shall we call them?”

For the first time tonight, Yilan shelved the possibility of a rage-induced apoplexy for a frustrated ejection of breath. One might call it a sigh if not for its resemblance to sounds an angry tiger would make. “Twisting the rules into dead knots, yeah,” she said. “Simple rules means a lot more room to go in both a crowbar and brain the other guy with semantics, or whatever.”

“With semantics, yes,” said Yugi. “Not with an actual crowbar. Right?”

Yilan rolled her eyes. 

Likely aware that this particular line of inquiry was in vain, Yugi turned his attention to Johanna instead. “Will she hit someone with a crowbar?” 

“Yugi, you’re nine kinds of insane and I think all of them are hilarious,” said Johanna, “but the proper question to ask should be: are you brave enough to get between whatever’s being hit and the crowbar?”

The answer wasn’t as much a yes-no as it was a personality quiz. In a continuous effort to defy the baby-cheeks he was born with, Yugi tilted his head, thought for, how do you say, _way too long_ , and finally said, “No.”

“You can’t reason with people like him, Johanna,” said Yilan. “Sometimes you walk in with your team ready to drag people out of the blast zone, but when you find the guy he’s rigged to the teeth with molotovs and a homemade flamethrower. Which is dumb, because you can’t fight an explosion with more explosions.”

Yugi’s expression turned critical. “Actually—” 

“There will be no more explosions unless absolutely necessary,” Johanna said firmly. Fully aware of the differing standards of _necessary_ present in the room, she continued, “All which occur must pass my judgement first, seeing how you’ve forgotten that the person who has to feature in all the exploding shots is _me_.”

That shut Yugi and Yilan up. They were both unhinged to a significant degree, but at least they’d accidentally fed enough civilians to their respective evils not to jump with joy at the prospect of more.

Naturally, the conversation steered itself toward the occult, as things tend to do between practicing exorcists.

“The eye is more of a hereditary thing, I think?” Yugi said, hands cupped around the very shiny and very magic eye on his forehead. It gave his cheeks a natural contour while also making him look insane. The things people did for beauty were wondrous. “The spirit I mentioned earlier—um, my soul-roommate—he had a knack for ancient Egyptian rituals, being an ancient Egyptian himself. I used to think all the hocus-pocus came from him, but apparently it’s just muscle memory.”

“It’s always muscle memory,” said Yilan. “Half of everything is just practice. Just look at Aunty Wei! Everyone thought her talismans were ‘barbaric’ and ‘lacked elegance’, but she could draw them twice as fast as everybody else and all hers ended in something coming apart in more pieces than it started with.”

“Aunty Wei?”

“One of my tutors back home. She could twist your head off with one hand and she might be immortal. Can you change what colour your eye glows?”

Yugi could, in fact, change the colour his eye glowed. This was a pleasant surprise to both him and Yilan despite its total lack of practical application. Life was about the little things, sometimes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you find any references to other fics i've written. no you didn't
> 
> i really like yugi's character, especially all the different interpretations you can go wild with! in this fic i thought: what happens when you turn a hobby into a career, and also what happens when the process consists of various emotionally harrowing experiences that one could easily grieve over years into the future? what happens if you don't get the pseudo closure that DSoD gave? oh, and also ghosts, because i feel like it. maybe give someone an exploding talisman and a chair while you're at it. we're all here to have a good time.
> 
> in any case, thank you for reading! feel free to talk to me at my [twitter](https://twitter.com/novalotypo)!


	2. Chapter 2

Hanging around Johanna and Yilan rapidly warped small but significant parts of your brain. 

Not in a bad way! Definitely not in a bad way. Yugi didn’t have much room to speak, considering his opinion was buried under a pile of life experiences not typically associated with sane people, but so far his impromptu vacation had been... nice.

Nobody had challenged him to a duel. _Not a single person._ How incredible was that? 

Yes, a few souls had been stretched this way and that way, but nobody had been killed who hadn’t already been dead. Normally, Yugi would be a little more conflicted on the subject (again, his life experiences gave credence to being very sad about everything), but it was difficult to proceed with that train of thought when the conductors were hurling your ghosts out the windows. Er—more than just your ghosts, actually. 

Yilan thought Yugi’s penchant for shadow games was amusing. He was beginning to think she wasn’t so scary after all, once you got past the metaphorical crowbar she had hefted over her shoulder all the time.

She thought Yugi’s ancient nightlight sigil was _funny_. She thought it had _practical uses._ She didn’t run away screaming whenever something evil was spirited away as a result of losing a shadow game.

The saying went _old habits die hard_ , but that was if those habits died at all. The legacy that had been prepackaged for him was a very nice one, just gorgeous, complete with shiny wrapping and tissue paper, but it made a very odd noise when you shook it. And also felt much heavier when you went to pick it up.

It was much easier to make friends when those friends had no comparison to hold your current image up to. Was that a sad thought? Perhaps. 

Something told Yugi that even _if_ Johanna and Yilan had known him pre-puzzle, the passage of fate would have remained pretty much the same. Vaguely concerned Johanna might be, but she drew out strict lines for herself and refused to stray out of those lines, except during her Occasional Outbursts. Those were fun! A little terrifying from an introspective standpoint, but fun.

Yilan thought progressively increasing one’s arsenal of deadly techniques was part of everyday life. So.

The world was a vast place, but important pieces had broken off due to—er, external factors that took the shape of overenthusiastic content creators. Yugi found he didn’t mind it as much as he probably should have. Then again, this was a separate world from his typical variety of Duel Monsters and King of Games and challenge after challenge after challenge... in a sense. Certainly he was being challenged, but this wasn’t Duel Monsters. This was Youtube content creation. And it was _fascinating._

“You should really tell us the truth before you suffer a humiliating defeat,” Johanna informed today’s unlucky ghost. “It’s not so much a matter of _if_ as it is _when_ , you know.”

Tsubami-san determinedly ignored Johanna. She was a very determined ghost. She had determinedly challenged them all to a game of Spoons, which was perhaps not the best decision to make against a group consisting of the King of Games, an exorcist with the instincts of a feral mongoose, and a walking wad of barfight adrenaline.

“Why did you agree to Spoons when you’re so bad at it?” Yilan demanded. “I almost feel bad. I never feel bad. You’ve made me do my good deed for the year. This is so wrong.”

“Tsubami-san can agree to whatever she wants,” Yugi said, trying to be polite. “I’m sure she’s a very responsible ghost who can look after herself.”

“Uh-huh,” Yilan said dubiously.

The skepticism was reasonable. It’d been a good two minutes since all the spoons had been claimed, but it’d also been the fifth time in a row that Tsubami-san had gotten the boot first, which sort of defeated the purpose. 

Yugi had to remind himself that this was a shadow game. He had a distinct feeling the shadows were unimpressed.

“Your employer must be a very rude person,” Johanna went on, in the same manner a surgeon would with a scalpel. “I can’t imagine being a ghost, enjoying a good spiritual jaunt or two, and then getting roped into some... necromantic pyramid scheme. How do you feel about your situation, Tsubami-san?”

“Can you hurry up and pass me more cards?” Tsubami-san said irritably.

“Yes, of course,” said Johanna. “I know it must be very difficult. This is a very difficult time for Ayagami. Memorials and parks can be terribly offensive. Not that I would know the feeling since I’m not dead, but I can imagine. One could say the only thing I can do is imagine, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

Yugi peered over at Yilan. Yilan peered back, her smile as professional as a warrior exorcist could manage. _Occasional Outburst_ , she mouthed. 

Johanna leaned toward Tsubami-san. “What kind of person recruits a bunch of on-fire ghosts to do their dirty work for them, Tsubami-san? I believe only a very bad person could think a thought like that. Oh, and I’ve met my share of bad people before. In my experience, most of them tend to keel over when you hit them really hard over the head with a vase. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Anyone can do anything if they try hard enough, Tsubami-san. Training yourself to reach for a blunt object every time a large creature looms over you is a good reflex to have. It really spices up your panic attacks! Well, sometimes all you do is make it worse because now you have to deal with the unconscious monstrosity on the floor as well as your deep-seated trauma, but willful ignorance is another reflex you can work on. Very fun, very useful, very natural. What do you think, Tsubami-san?”

Yugi watched in awe as Tsubami-san passed on all her cards. She _had_ to have a set by now. The entire deck had travelled the course of the table four times over. But no: “Can you just keep passing me cards?”

“Certainly,” said Johanna, mania positively dripping out of her ears.

The final nail in the coffin—or, um, the final nail in the second coffin—was when Yilan realized that her batteries were low and her spares were in her bag upstairs. She resolved the issue of potentially losing out on footage by ensuring there wasn’t any footage she _could_ miss out on. In not so many words, she peeled a sticky note off its pad, scribbled something on it with red crayon, stuck the whole package to her spoon, and then pitched the spoon at Tsubami-san.

That was probably more words, now that Yugi thought about it. But it was necessary to explain in order to understand why Tsubami-san imploded on impact.

It was a very surreal thing to witness. Yugi had seen many things explode in his life, but imploding was harder to come by. Mostly because it took a lot more effort, but also because Yugi went out of his way to avoid people who looked like they could cause things to implode. Survival instinct kicked in at a certain point.

 _“Yilan,”_ said Johanna, in the tone of Disappointed Handler.

“I’m not spending any more batteries watching a ghost kick its own ass for the sixth time in a row,” Yilan said, annoyed. She wrenched her spoon out of the wall opposite. “We need to find some smarter ghosts! So far we’ve had Sir Break-And-Enter, bug-slinging googly-eyes, and circuit-broken hot-potato. Can we _please_ talk to someone who isn’t useless?”

“We could talk to living people,” said Yugi. Yilan’s face suggested that she thought both living and dead to be equal in uselessness, but Yugi powered on anyway. “That first ghost we met said he used to work at a clothing shop a few blocks away, right? We could start there.”

“I especially like that your idea doesn’t involve tampering with the gas main,” Johanna said, which was concerning, but not surprising. “The clothing shop it is!”

The owner of said clothing shop wasn’t particularly pleased to contemplate his own mortality before dinner, but he tolerated their presence with as much grace as he could muster, which wasn’t none, but was certainly very little. 

“Ayagami is perfectly normal,” he insisted. “And besides, which small town doesn’t have a few ghosts? Maybe ours like to run down the streets while on fire, but at least they have the decency to go about it at a decent time.”

“How fascinating,” said Johanna. “If you can recall at all, did anything interesting occur alongside these ghost marathons? Say, for example, an unusually sketchy person moving into town? Or maybe a madman chanting gibberish at the sky at ungodly hours?”

The owner thought for a while. A slow certainty dawned on his face, which he tried and failed to will away. “Nothing in particular stands out,” he attempted to lie convincingly, and failed that as well.

Johanna smiled. It was a brilliant smile. She’d been smiling that same exact smile for the entire duration of the conversation. It had most certainly gone stale and creepy by now, but sometimes people only spilled their secrets when you paced slowly toward them with a hot poker. Most of the time they hoped you weren’t _really_ going to jab them, because that would be rude and insane, but a smile could only sit for so long before they wondered how pointy the teeth were under there, and maybe if they threw something in the opposite direction, they’d be left alone...

“Actually,” said the owner, after a timely epiphany, “I do remember a young man moving into town! He was... er, very passionate about occult paraphernalia. He set up a little game shop near the park, I believe. Though I’ve never heard of Ouija board chess—anyway, he’s an odd fellow! Very sprightly, very cheerful. Possibly very depressed. Also very scary if you run into him during the early hours of the morning. You might want to ask him whatever’s on your mind.”

There was a good chance that murder was on Yilan’s mind. It was the reason she ran the camera. In the unfortunate case that someone twitched wrong, there at least existed the _possibility_ of grabbing her by the collar instead of the definite conclusion that officials were going to be on the scene shortly.

“He was playing chess on a _Ouija board?_ ” Yilan demanded as they exited the shop. “What kind of deranged psychopath does that?”

“It’s not that bad of an idea,” said Yugi. Right? He’d definitely gotten involved in weirder shenanigans. “It’d work if you wanted to play chess against a ghost. A ghost that isn’t on fire,” he added, when Yilan opened her mouth.

“Yilan is very touchy about bastardizing board games,” Johanna explained, which... didn’t really explain anything at all, actually. 

“Aunty Wei would be so mad,” Yilan went on, heated. “She _hates_ when people make up roundabout rules. Her dad used to make up as much nonsense as he could just to see how quick she’d throttle him whenever he ‘lost the instructions’, which was _fast_ , and also _with lethal force._ ”

Goodness! You really learned something new every day, didn’t you?

“She throttled her dad?” Yugi asked delicately.

“Her dad might be immortal too, it’s whatever. Can we punch out a gamer now?”

* * *

Yugi was used to matters escalating quickly and all at once. 

If anybody knew exactly how much you needed to bash a fan before it sputtered to a sad death, it was Yugi. He wasn’t exactly proud of being the world champion of catastrophic crowd control, but at least people usually knew to run the opposite direction of whichever way he was heading. 

One could argue that the amount of bullshit one encountered in their life could be quantifiably measured to predict exactly when the fan would break, and that one should take precautionary measures when everything caught fire. 

Yugi had the science down to the _second._ He just _knew._ The little voice in his head—no, not _that_ one, the one next to it— _that_ little voice had a knack for telling exactly when and how badly something would go wrong. Then that little voice passed everything down the assembly line, where Yugi’s imagination would rig up a terrifying image of all his loved ones dying by method of his inaction. Mental capacities suitably destroyed, Yugi’s body would then flail one way or another, and—surprise!—the apocalypse would be shelved for another day.

He had skirted by apocalyptic events with the grace of an overambitious hiker wielding a can of bear spray before. How hard was it to manage again?

...He couldn’t even _think_ that question with a straight face. 

If this vacation had taught him anything, it was that the world was a vast place, full of people who thought logic was a futile endeavor and that chaos wasn’t as much theory as it was the universe raining meteors from above.

Maybe today the universe had decided to rain down meteors in the shape of riddle-engraved doors, complete with questionable defense mechanisms. Either that, or people were reaching new heights of creativity with shadow games, which was never a good sign. 

Yugi prodded the door experimentally. The door prodded back, but with teeth.

A futile endeavour indeed, he thought. Thinking was something better left for work hours.

“I’m not very good at riddles,” Johanna said, from where she stood five meters away. She gripped her flyswatter like a bat and had yet to drop her stance. Yugi was content to maintain the distance. “I’ve always thought they were the world’s dumbest multiple choice questions. Yilan?”

Yilan stopped rummaging through her bag in favour of offering Johanna a scathing glare. “Do I look like I have the patience to solve riddles?”

“Right. Yugi?”

“Riddles aren’t as much tests of wit as tests of how quickly you can convince the riddler that they’re uneducated and culturally ignorant despite their degree in Classics,” said Yugi. 

Johanna sighed. Her shoulders fell, and with them, the swatter. “We really should’ve brought the golf clubs.”

“We can improvise,” said Yilan. She crossed the five meters with the knowledge that if Yugi’s magic eye turned on her, she could supplex him into the ground and up to the knees. Which was a worrying thought if you were on the receiving end, so Yugi shuffled back and let Yilan turn her ire on the door instead.

So far their attempts to break it down had included: contained ritualistic immolation, exploding talismans, exploding talismans (ver. spoon), and a particularly spiteful _thwap_ with a flyswatter. None of them had achieved any visible results. 

Yilan scratched the door with her nail. When the door bit back, she slapped it with her other hand. As one does, naturally. 

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve seen something like this before. Some sects back home like using mazze arrays to subtly tell you to get the hell out or die trying. This is kind of similar. Nobody had poor enough taste to add biters, though... anyway, I have some experience breaking down stubborn doors.”

“With that roundhouse? Preposterous!” was what Yugi didn’t say, since he was fond of all his teeth. “How so?” he asked instead, trying to be helpful.

Yilan’s expression was that of a crazy thing. “Here’s a fun fact about me, Yugi,” she began, and immediately Yugi began to fear for his life. “I’m no good at making talismans. I’m terrible at drawing them, and even worse at snipping them out. But when it comes to tampering with them? Oh, sir, there’s no one better.”

 _Tampering with the gas main,_ Johanna’s voice said from very far away. 

“Oh,” said Yugi. Suddenly five meters _really_ wasn’t far enough. “Is that... I mean, you intend for all your talismans to explode, isn’t that right?”

“Sometimes I get the strokes wrong and they implode instead,” said Yilan. 

“Right. Of course. We all make mistakes.” Yugi felt significantly safer from where he stood a little behind Johanna. “While we’re on the topic, what do you plan to do with the man who locked us in here?”

“I don’t get to choose what happens,” Yilan said, in a voice that implied she wasn’t happy about it, but understood that although guard rails were ugly they were still there for a reason. 

“ _I_ get to decide what happens,” said Johanna. “I get to ask the questions, after all. Which I plan to do! I have a lot of questions. I’m sure we’ll get a lot of answers. I’m quite good at getting lots of answers.”

“I believe you,” Yugi muttered, having been thoroughly wringed of answers himself.

Yilan jabbed at the door some more. Then she pulled various utensils out of her bag. Several of them had blades on the ends, and the ones that didn’t were hefty enough to send through a window. 

This was the side of life Yugi had spent his entire life looking away from. Not that he hadn’t wanted to see it, but because he’d been scrambling so madly to hang onto the cliff that he hadn’t realized the drop was something he could reach with his toes. And that was saying something, respective heights considered. 

Yugi thought for a little. His thoughts drifted across the typical variety: what his life was, where he was headed, what shape his dreams took. Sometimes those thoughts made him very sad, but currently his brain was preoccupied with exploiting and maybe exploding a shadow game.

It took a considerable amount of effort to get Yugi’s brain to jump the hurdle between _then_ and _now._ Somehow, it had managed the leap. The world was bright and new and Yugi was in the middle of it.

Well, the world was _usually_ bright and new. Currently it was deep, dark, and damp. Elsewhere the deep was less suffocating and the dark was a shade comprehensible by the human mind, but at least the damp part was familiar. It was difficult to get fancy with damp, Yugi thought.

“What was it Aunty Wei said about vermillion again?” Yilan said to herself, scratching something off the door with a craft knife. “Flip it around, shake it a bit, alakazam, and then necromancy?”

“I’m pretty sure it was her dad that said that,” said Johanna. She had cleared the five meters and occasionally _thwaped_ at jaws she deemed too corporeal. “Her dad said if you added some strokes to a warding talisman it turned it into a magnet instead or something. The necromancy thing had more to do with undue trauma. Why?”

Yilan was silent for a moment.

In a perhaps unwise attempt to prove himself the fastest thinker in the room, Yugi said, “Oh! You mean to make a spirit bomb of sorts, don’t you?”

For a moment Yilan fixed him with a glare that would have instantly annihilated a weaker person. Yugi smiled serenely in response, on account he was friends with Seto Kaiba.

“A spirit bomb?” Johanna repeated dubiously. She leaned in to where Yilan was in the act of lighting a spiritual fuse. “That’s against the rules, isn’t it?”

“Where in the rules does it say ‘thou shalt not not vacuum malevolent spirits into a condensed ball and then explode said ball’?” Yilan asked, annoyed.

“I was under the impression that violence of any kind was prohibited by shadow game terms.”

“In that case, both of us should’ve been dead a while ago.”

At a standstill, Johanna and Yilan both turned to Yugi.

How do you explain to newly-initiated dabblers-in-the-dark-arts that violence was prohibited only for a certain value of violent? Not clearly, and definitely not coherently.

“Well,” Yugi began, “it isn’t really _prohibited_. Not really. Sometimes it’s even encouraged? I’m sorry—that sounded like a question. It wasn’t. A lot of the time it’s encouraged. Anyway, we weren’t given a timer and the consequences for a wrong answer weren’t elaborated upon in gruesome detail, which means we should be fine as long as we don’t prod too hard at the shadows. I think.”

“See?” Yilan said, gesturing with an exasperated hand. “Our resident King of Games and slayer of souls thinks it’ll be fine. I’m sure he’s blown up a game or two before.”

Yugi had never blown up a game. Not during a game, at least! Penalty games were a different kind of sport. Anyway, walking out of a shadow game was awfully rude. Claiming it was bad sportsmanship was inaccurate, mostly because anyone who started a shadow game had murder at the very top of their priorities and sportsmanship at the very bottom, but Yugi had _standards._ The drama of the moment, not to mention the years of meticulous evil preparation, sort of fell apart when you decided you had more pressing concerns.

Inflicting psychic damage via the tried and true method of turning around and walking the opposite direction was grievous. Kaiba had crushed many an opponent by walking into a game, holding deeply unimpressed eye contact for a moment, walking off, and then returning fifteen minutes later with a coffee. 

How were you supposed to explain that sort of injury to first responders? It was hard enough to say, oh officer, it was so tragic, I dropped a Nibiru and then he went catatonic! Either he’s furious beyond words or having a stroke! With shadow games... well, what were you supposed to say? Sorry officer, he threatened me with death so I went to town on how desolate his fashion sense was, I didn’t lay a single hand on him, I swear, if you can parse through his uncontrollable sobbing you’ll hear how very sorry he is for existing— 

Probably not. Yugi had standards! He also found it exceedingly awkward when people cried on him, given he never knew what to do with his hands. Best to avoid that conundrum entirely.

Getting tossed into disasters with Seto was so nice. He had a certain aura about him that convinced everyone he had a right to be anywhere, and if you stood close enough to him nobody was going to tell you otherwise. And, of course, once the officials were suitably terrified they let you use the coffee machine and told you where the bathroom was.

Yes, thought Yugi, as he watched Yilan grab Johanna’s arm and hightail it from significantly further than five meters away, and also with his hands over his head. Standing next to a storm always made for a memorable time.

 _“Get down!”_ shouted Yilan.

The world went white. It was suitably dramatic.

* * *

Johanna had never been one for card games.

She just didn’t particularly care for them. That was it! That was all. Was that blasphemous to think given her current company? Then again, Yugi looked like he had a lot to think about. His position in life, what sort of future he envisioned for himself, whether or not he should pick up a hobby...

But that was for later. Or maybe never. It was the dealer’s choice, really. The point Johanna was trying to make was that she didn’t really care about card games, no matter how much everybody else did. Which was a lot.

Oh, she knew how to play Uno and President and _Gong Zhu_ and a few others, of course, but that was mostly because she’d been too proud of a summer school student to pass up a game when challenged, and also because when she got drunk she tended to pick up new and exciting skills. 

Duel Monsters was one of _those_ games: the kind you’d definitely heard of somewhere, whether it be on the news or in ads or in an article about horrible incidents involving lots of collateral damage. 

A reasonable person would think: collateral damage? Because of card games? Goodness, that new banlist must be something tragic!

It took a very special kind of person to jump to the conclusion: Oh hoh! I see that a new villain has paraded into town, armed to the teeth with dark artefacts and shadow games, no less! Somebody should tell the authorities, who should then phone KaibaCorp, and god knows what’ll happen when you throw Seto Kaiba at a problem!

If you were lucky, you’d have Yugi’s phone number on hand and could avoid the Kaiba collateral altogether. Not because Yugi had any better of a track record when it came to not destroying the city, but because he was a lot friendlier and if worst came to worst it was still easier to duck under a Black Burning than a Blue Stream of Destruction.

This was Johanna’s current conundrum. One could even describe it as a fracas. 

“Something tells me that isn’t your cosplayer friend who’s popping into town right now,” Johanna said, gazing up at a... floating, grinning girl. 

Yugi opened his mouth, presumably to explain. Yilan beat him to the punch. 

“The classic Magician Girl archetype,” Yilan said. It was impressive how unimpressed she was. “ _Obviously_ he’d bring his trademark deck to whatever marketing scheme KaibaCorp’s hosting in Kyoto. Though I guess it doesn’t matter what kind of cards the guy’s got—his real superpower is godlike top-decking and absurd confidence.”

That was the kind of statement that, under normal circumstances, usually had people not just eating but shoving their own words back into their mouth.

Fortunately, as long as you were halfway decent Yugi was amiable and anyone who cared to put their hand near Yilan’s mouth didn’t deserve it anyway. 

“Well, that’s fair enough,” said Yugi. He gestured up toward Dark Magician Girl, who winked back. “Dark Magician Girl says that she’s pleased to meet you, and, er, is happy to have a chat about exothermic reactions of the volatile variety.” Yugi blinked. “Aren’t those just explosions?”

“Are those cards sentient?” Johanna demanded.

“Yes? Sort of? Only for a certain value of sentient—” 

Then they all ducked as—oh _boy_ , this really _was_ a fracas—as another girl who also appeared of the magical breed jumped out of the alley and shot a stream of water at their motley little crew. 

An odd sentence to think, and perhaps an overreaction, but Johanna took a few careful steps back when she saw what that water did to the wall. Or what was left to the wall. Who armed trading cards with magic water cannons? Was this legal?

“Gishki Ariel,” said Yugi, and it took a few seconds for Johanna to realize he’d identified their assailant. “Not a particularly powerful card by itself, but the archetype is nasty if you can manage a good hand loop.”

“I’ll pretend I understand what you just said,” Johanna told him. “This is the part where you beat the guy into oblivion, right?”

“Actually, shadow games get a lot more convoluted when you start randomly summoning cards. The rules play a bit fast and loose since it’s less Duel Monsters and more Dungeons and Dragons—”

The sight of Yugi’s head split down the middle was one that would have soldered itself onto Johanna’s eyeballs for the rest of eternity. Fortunately, Yilan had the reflexes of an angry mongoose and the behaviour of one inflicted with rabies. 

The sword that came dropping out of the sky was connected to a boy who looked very offended to have been hurled into the crazy water lady. Both went down in a vaguely homicidal heap.

“And there’s Gishki Avance,” said Yugi, in a noticeably more wary tone. “...Did you have a knife on you the entire time?”

“I told you we don’t use swords anymore,” Yilan snapped. The knife, which was more of a really short sword, shone something wicked under the street lights. “So we’re up against a magical girl and a dude with a sword. Great! We have our own magical girl and I have a knife. We also have a Johanna. What could go wrong?”

Yugi’s brows furrowed. “Well—” 

“That was a rhetorical question.” Yilan flipped the knife into a reverse grip, and Yugi shifted a little further away. “I’ll take the sword guy. You get the girl. Johanna, can you find our gambler?”

Both Yugi and Yilan settled their mildly feral gazes onto her. Dark Magician Girl gave her a bubbly thumbs-up. Johanna peered past them to where the heap was getting a lot more than vaguely homicidal by the second.

“Yeah,” said Johanna. She lifted her flyswatter up with a smile. It was nice that her only weapon was also a magic nuclear warhead. “At the end of the day, he’s just a guy, right? And if you hit a guy hard enough he’ll go down no matter how much he’s spent on trading cards.”

Yugi didn’t look very settled by that statement, whereas Yilan simply bared her teeth. “Then go hit him _really_ hard,” she said.

“Though if you can find a chair, I’d suggest trying that first,” said Yugi.

That was about the appropriate time for the sword-waving madman to make a wild lunge forward. And an angry boy with a sword is surprisingly accurate before you neck-chop them into the ground.

Best leave the smiting to the gods, Johanna thought to herself, and quickly fled the scene. 

With professional speed and terrible determination, Johanna sprinted into the alleyway, looked up, and caught eyes with a water pipe (handhold) that if sentient would have tried to hide.

Clambering up walls was a talent not many people possessed. All for the better: apartment break-ins tended to escalate quickly when you couldn’t afford blackout curtains and woke up to the Hamburglar plastered against your window.

Johanna considered herself an amateur building-scaler. The natural instinct would be to ask _why_ , which she couldn’t really answer. Her best guess was that one day she’d gotten drunk, and... that was about it. But it was a good guess, and probably accurate.

Where did villains like to throw down fire and chaos from? Why, from above, of course!

The stupid ones did, at least. The smarter ones realized that if you loitered on a roof you’d have finished half your own downfall. All your pursuers had to do was the other half, which was simple work and made the term _downfall_ a lot more literal. 

With that happy thought in mind, Johanna pulled herself onto the roof. She stepped past Yilan’s cameras, which there were many of, and all of them were rolling.

Then she stopped. Blinked. Rubbed her eyes, then blinked again.

Huh. Godlike top-decking, indeed.

* * *

“How did she get on the roof so quickly?” Yugi asked, properly baffled.

“We all have our talents, Mister Luck-of-the-Draw,” said Yilan, rolling her eyes.

That _had_ to be Johanna shifting about on the roof. The street lights weren’t very helpful in confirming nor denying Yugi’s suspicions, but he had a feeling. It wasn’t a good one, but his gut, while not particularly large, was at the very least accurate. 

How Johanna and Yilan knew where the villain of the day was hiding was beyond Yugi. He’d never started a manhunt before. All he’d ever done was end them. Trouble always found _him_ , but now he _was_ the trouble, or maybe he was standing beside the trouble, and just happened to get pulled in...

Was this what it felt like to be a bystander? 

How cathartic, was what Yugi wanted to think. And it was! In a certain way, at least. Being center stage all the time meant that everybody had expectations, and of course you had to meet those expectations. If a crowd tossed flowers it meant they also had the arm strength to throw tomatoes, and bricks, and possibly nails, if they were feeling really spiteful.

Being a bystander meant that nobody was impressed by your existence. Did that sound sad? It might’ve been sad, but Yugi had plateaued on that front a few years back. Now he was just happy to catch a break.

Besides, Yilan was the most unimpressed person to ever exist. A bit of ancient terror did wonders in resetting the brain.

“Whoever our gambler is, they aren’t very good at Duel Monsters,” said Yugi. He was briefly interrupted by the whine of a Dark Burning connecting with solid form, then continued, “I assume they dabbled in rituals, watched a few Youtube videos, and bought the archetype they found most aesthetically pleasing.”

“You mean magical girls and pretty boys,” Yilan said dryly. 

“Actually, the Gishki archetype is a lot more nuanced—”

Gishki Avance decided now was the perfect time to pull a Gishki Aquamirror out of nowhere. In the context of a proper duel, Yugi might have been alarmed. He was almost relieved when Avance turned to Yilan with a hateful glare and began stalking toward her with the mirror held aloft.

Yilan’s mouth pulled into a predatory smile. “Ooh, is our generic white-haired pretty boy trying something new? Itty bitty birthday boy wants to play? Generic stoic protagonist-looking dumbass wants to throw down?”

Then she leapt backward, which was a wise choice, because Gishki Aquamirror was a very large mirror and Gishki Avance was a very angry card. The mirror might not have hit anything substantial, but it was still in one piece and made a funny _thwomp_ sound as it travelled from side to side.

That... wasn’t how spell cards worked. That definitely wasn’t how Gishki Aquamirror worked. Yugi felt a little offended on behalf of the rulebook. Duel Monsters was a complicated game with many interesting mechanics! Blunt force trauma was, to the shared disappointment of his current company, not one of them. Usually.

Even Dark Magician Girl took a second to peer over at Yilan, who was backflipping with bravado, and then at Gishki Avance, who was chasing her with significantly less bravado.

Dark Magician Girl wore a very distinct _what the fuck?_ kind of look. She gave Yugi a bewildered tilt of the head, which he answered with a helpless shrug.

Normality adequately destroyed, Dark Magician Girl turned back to face Gishki Ariel. Her stance was reminiscent of a batter preparing to fight god.

Madness is a disease, Yugi thought, but now we’ve all got it. And once you’ve got it, what can you do but spread it around?

Mad he might have been, but Yugi still winced at the sound of Dark Magician Girl’s staff connecting with Gishki Ariel’s face. At least monster cards came and left in one piece. They didn’t lose limbs, or blood, or teeth...

“Nice swing!” Yilan shouted, passing by with a bright grin. A mirror _thwomped_ after her.

While Gishki Ariel was busy reconfiguring her face, Gishki Emilia slunk out of the shadows. She took one look at her comrades and then made a valiant effort not to exist.

Best to solve problems before they got desperate, Yugi decided, his heart heavy with pity. 

Normally he’d add a dramatic little flourish before telling Kiwi Magician Girl to knock someone’s skull in. It almost felt... _wrong_ not to. The current situation, however, called for caution. Yilan was very liberal with where she put that knife and if it stuck she took it as a good sign. 

Yugi felt his arms were safer tucked against his chest than flailing around. You could never guess when Yilan’s instincts decided to act up, and Yugi wasn’t ready to test any of his theories while she had a sharp object.

“Johanna’s going to be perfectly fine,” Yilan said in passing, when she caught Yugi checking the rooftops again. “She has tons of experience scrambling up walls. You know, when you lose your keys to your flat and need to get in.” 

Yugi tested out a laugh. “How often do you misplace your keys?”

“Misplace? Oh, no. If you punch a faerie with your keys between your knuckles they melt.”

“The... the faerie, or the keys?”

“Both.”

Hope was a cruel thing. On the bright side, Yugi had faced a lot crueler. “Well, I don’t know about all that! Do you think Johanna will be alright?”

Yilan sidestepped another _thwomp_. Her arm flew out to the side, and there was a very definite sound of something being stabbed. “She’ll be fine,” said Yilan. “I’ve seen a lot of weird things in my time, and I’m sure you’ve seen even weirder. But Johanna’s Occasional Outbursts are something special.”

“They really are,” Yugi muttered, feeling oddly like he’d made friends with a certain Thief King all over again.

By the time Dark Magician Girl and Kiwi Magician Girl had... oh god, by the time they had... finished typing up Gishki Ariel and Gishki Emilia like tried convicts, the dredges of manic adrenaline were leaving Yilan. She tapped her foot impatiently, scanning the rooftops as if expecting someone to fall off.

“That was a unique kind of duel,” Yugi said, trying to fill the silence. “Certainly not my kind of duel, I mean. A shadow game tripwired into another shadow game, though—that’s innovation right there.”

Yilan’s expression was critical. “That’s as creative as your villains get?”

“It’s as creative as I allow,” Yugi said firmly.

The tapping abated a bit. “Then that’s fine, I guess. What do you plan to do after this?”

It took a moment for Yugi’s brain to catch up. Yilan lived life by furiously drifting across every corner, and the resulting skid marks informed the average person that if you didn’t move you would be run over. 

“After this?” Yugi repeated delicately.

“I mean, after—” Yilan made a vague gesture unto the world. “All this nonsense, and your show in Kyoto. What’s your plan?”

Yugi opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, when he was ready for another attempt.

Yilan cut him off with a dismissive wave. “Nevermind. That was a stupid question. It’s none of my business anyway. Whatever you plan on doing, you ought to do another collab with us sometime! You’ve been to Toronto and Vancouver for conventions before, right?” At Yugi’s startled nod, she went on, “Thought so. If you have time next time you’re in Canada, give us a call. We’ll find some creepy abandoned cabin and ghost it up. We’ll make smores, hit a wendigo over the head with a chair, incite a war in the comments section, all that jazz. It’ll be great.”

Yugi had never been run over by a car before, but that entire spiel had blindsided him with all the intensity of an eighteen-wheeler. “What?” he said weakly.

Yilan punched him gamely in the shoulder. “You’ve got great camera presence, Mister King of Games,” she said. “But don’t bother committing if you don’t want to. It’s chill and we’ll show up at your matches regardless, though it won’t be _your_ merch we’ll be promoting. So? How’s another round sound?”

“I... okay?” said Yugi.

“That’s a good boy,” said Yilan, punching him again. 

Her perception of _gamely_ was what most people considered _a bat to the shoulder_ , but Yugi wasn’t about to tell her that. Besides, his mouth was doing weird things. At the current time it was determined to open and close at random intervals while his brain furiously kicked itself. 

It saved him the trouble of making a fool of himself, at least. Not that he needed any help in that regard, but the thought was appreciated.

“Let’s grab your cameras?” Yugi cleared his throat in an attempt to expel his squeak-high lilt. “Cameras! Yes. Let’s go grab your cameras. I’m sure you caught a lot of excellent footage! Lots of blurry apparitions and spirit orbs for skeptics to parse through, right?”

“Yugi,” Yilan said patiently, “between clumps of dust floating by the lens and a paranormal street fight, which one do you think makes for better entertainment?”

Yugi didn’t like that question very much. “The former,” he said determinedly. 

There was a long pause. For a second Yugi thought that Yilan’s definition of gamely was going to align a lot closer with his.

“Huh,” said Yilan. _“Huh.”_

From the torso up she leaned in, head cocked to one side, one eyebrow curved judgingly upward. She had clearly mastered the art of scrutiny, probably because it was neighbours with interrogation. 

Yugi bent back, chipper through sheer force of will alone. “What?” he said. “Is there something on my face?”

The silent evaluation in Yilan’s eyes would have been hurtful on anyone else’s face. But the thing with Yilan was that if you managed to scale the treacherous peaks of making her acquaintance, and if you were still conscious by the time you hit the bottom of the ravine she’d tripped you into, any sort of evaluation on her end wasn’t as much her taking a razor to your uneven edges as it was her deciding how best to break the news.

In any case, Yilan was still easier to read than Seto. She didn’t care what you saw as long as you ran the other way.

“You don’t have much of a social media presence,” Yilan finally said, which was infinitely worse than Yugi had expected, if only by implication.

“I... no?” said Yugi. “I mean, I have an official social media presence, with the little you’re-a-real-human checkmark, but I don’t much care for waving it around.”

“That’ll work,” said Johanna. Her smile raised hackles in Yugi’s mind. “You’re a bit of a cryptid then, aren’t you? A metal-studded mystery that everyone wants to see on a game show if only to watch everybody descend into hysterics over godlike trivia subject flips? Oh, you’ll do great. Oh, you’ll do _great_.”

“There’s no need to repeat yourself,” Yugi said, leaning back further. “I heard you the first time.”

“Sorry. I’m just excited.”

“Whatever for?”

“I’m in charge of making new emotes for our Discord server,” said Johanna, radiating keenness and as a consequence also homicidal intent. “How much do you think people would pay to have a little sticker of the King of Games bashing someone’s head in with a staff?”

“I think it can’t possibly be worse than having Seto plaster my face on the side of every moving vehicle come tournament season,” said Yugi.

“Oh, you _wish_ ,” said Johanna, and then up on the rooftop there was a wicked _crack_ and a screech of pain. 

* * *

The art of breaking a chair over one’s head was a complex one. Oftentimes it involved a lot of technical elements, like how best to hold someone in place when you came at them swinging a chair, or which leg to continue the assault with when something inevitably broke off.

Despite everything, the most pressing concern for most chair-wielding warriors was society’s tendency to keep furniture locked up in houses. A street fight got a tad complicated when the authorities asked if you’d gotten that antique piano stool from the mansion down the road, and whether you were going to invoke your right to remain silent anytime soon.

The best way to defang a maniac was to take away the chair. Everybody knew that. It was practically a rule of existence. Knit into the fabric of reality. An indisputable fact of existence...

Except it _wasn’t_ , because Johanna was firmly of the belief that the universe played Russian roulette with every chamber loaded. If a rulebook existed anywhere out there, it was just as good as a firestarter as it was a referee.

“And you just—” Yugi took a breath and appeared to grab desperately at reality’s coattails. “You just... found a chair? Up on the roof?”

“Yes,” said Johanna. 

“It was just sitting there? Nobody crept out of the shadows and gave it a shove your way? Asked for your soul in exchange? Jingled around a purse which you assumed held coins but in hindsight might’ve been small bits of soul? It was just _there?_ ”

“Yes,” repeated Johanna. You had to be patient with these sorts of things.

Yugi’s face was no more comprehending than it had been at the start of this particular strand of inquiry. “You... you said you didn’t have chair-homing powers.”

“I don’t think that power exists at all,” said Yilan, tidying her cameras.

“Play Duel Monsters for long enough and you won’t be all that surprised to see _you can discard this card; brain your opponent with a blunt object_ as a card effect. You _really_ didn’t see anyone?”

“Yugi, I swear to you on my great-grandmother’s grave that I didn’t see anyone,” said Johanna. She placed a hand over her heart, solemn as the situation would allow. “Great-Gran always used to say ‘you can’t teach a brute manners but you sure can put him in the hospital’. Except in Gaelic, and most of the time she was down half a bottle of moonshine.”

An emotion reminiscent of fear slowly dawned on Yugi’s face. He clamped down on it valiantly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Alright. As long as you put the chair back, what does it matter?” He took another deep breath and continued, “Is your face alright, Morioka-san?”

“It’s as good as you think,” said Morioka-san, from where he sat petulantly on a bench. The neon FamilyMart sign gave the quadrilateral bruises on his cheek a wonderful green glow.

Wasn’t that a neat little detail? Didn’t people say stories ended best when you dragged them by the reins all the way back to the stable?

A thinking mind would have found some deeper meaning. Johanna’s mind was only peripherally aware of any meaning at all. Most of her mental capacities had failed once the clock had ticked over to 3:00 AM. 

At least I’m not the only one, she thought, watching as the cashier poked his head out the door with equal parts trepidation and apathy. His gaze passed between Johanna, Yilan, Yugi, Yugi’s hair, and finally the tied-up and beaten-up Morioka-san.

Here he chose not to say anything, but he did wave. It was a very weak wave. 

Johanna waved back to be polite. She squinted against the backlight, which probably came off as a murderous glare and likely contributed to the cashier’s haste retreat to the land of white lights and humming freezers and corporate indifference.

Yilan slipped her notepad back into her pocket. “Well, Morioka-san, I see you’re in a bit of a bind right now,” she said. “Very unfortunate, very bad. See, we can’t go to authorities with all this, since they’d call us insane and delusional, which you can’t fault them for since even _I_ think we’re at least somewhat insane and delusional—but! But. We _can_ introduce you to some of our friends. And we have some _very_ interesting friends. They make us look sane by comparison.”

Morioka-san, whose jaw had been stuck defiantly since he’d been tossed off a building, said, “Oh yeah? And what do you plan to do with me?”

“You started a shadow game,” said Yugi. “Granted, you weren’t very good at it, but the thing about shadow games is that whoever wins gets to fashion up a little something called a punishment game. Someone with looser morals might, for example, turn your visage into a jigsaw puzzle that you would find quite impossible to solve, and not only because of the agonizing pain. Now, I’m not sure if I need to explain this to you...?”

Morioka-san stuck his chin out even further. One side of his face was noticeably rounder than the other, giving him the appearance of a lopsided squirrel. “I know what a punishment game is,” he said. “I’ve read all about it!”

“Is that right?” said Yugi. “I wasn’t aware there was written documentation.”

“A subreddit is a perfectly valid source of information!”

“Oh god, you really _are_ crazy,” said Yilan. “Johanna, are you sure his entire brain is still in his head?”

“It was awfully dark,” Johanna pointed out. “If something squishy and pink fell out I wouldn’t have noticed.”

“I can hear you,” said Morioka-san, with some offense.

“Yes, and we’re so glad to have you in our company.” The notepad slid back out. Yilan rounded on her subject of interrogation, eyes shining with a mania you really didn’t want to encounter at three in the morning. One does not normally have much restraint at fuck-all AM. “I don’t know what sort of nightmarish hellscapes our friend Yugi here can slap together, but Aunty Wei used to say ‘if you can’t make them say sorry you can at least hang them off a cliff until they say uncle’.”

“Your relatives have very creative sayings,” Yugi mused aloud.

 _“The point is,”_ Yilan went on, sticking a stick of cinnabar at Morioka-san threateningly, “even if this ghost rave isn’t your fault, you’re still a very bad person. Someone with only sunshine and rainbows in their heart wouldn’t rope ghosts into gamer servitude, much less cheat at games _they’re already bad at._ I think I might hit you, actually.”

“No more hitting,” Johanna declared, waving the cinnabar away. 

Then she shuffled herself onto the bench beside Morioka-san. Morioka-san shuffled several healthy inches away. 

“Listen here, Morioka-san,” said Johanna. “We came to this town _because_ of curious reddit posts.”

“And also because it’s not too far out of the way from Kyoto,” said Yilan.

“Yes, that too. But we came here mostly because we heard a lot of stories about angry ghosts, and then people went on to claim that maybe their ancestors were angry at a memorial dedicated to them, of all things. Isn’t that cruel? Don’t you think that’s a little cruel?”

Morioka-san shifted uncomfortably. “It’s none of my business,” he muttered.

“I think it really might be,” Yugi said firmly. He had his arms crossed and the expression he wore was stony at best and ready to stone at worst. It had a put-through-a-window sort of quality, but there was a tiny crack down the middle. If you hit it too hard the entire building would come down and he’d be cutting with a lot more than eyeliner.

Restless spirits, ghostly loved ones, disrespected memory... all good and fun topics. Maybe not the best conversation to have next to somebody with an extraordinarily tall heap of baggage about those topics, but what was content creation if you didn’t prod a little too hard all the time?

It was too early for all this nonsense, anyway. 

“Alright, Morioka-san,” Johanna said, shifting closer. “I can tell you’re still a bit hesitant. That’s alright! I understand. I wouldn’t spill my secrets to someone who slapped me with a chair either. And what a good chair that was! Shame it’s broken now. Morioka-san, you moved into town a bit ago, didn’t you? A supposed stranger, walking into town with a creepy little game shop, in the middle of rural Japan? Goodness, Morioka-san, you don’t really care for appearances, do you? The residents of lovely Ayagami can smell the suspicion on you, and I’m afraid that isn’t the only reason they avoid you like the plague. I’m told you play Ouija chess, which while I think is a funny little invention also implies that you’re trying to reach out to ghosts with the specific intent of playing games, and the fact that you’re attempting to do so in a town that, before your intervention, had very little ghost activity means that you have a _personal_ connection to our current conundrum.”

Morioka-san’s jaw unstuck. “What—” 

“But that’s not all!” Johanna pressed in closer. “You have some experience with shadow games, but seeing how tragically bad you are at them makes me think you aren’t purposely riling up Ayagami’s ghosts for the purpose of being bad or smart. No, Morioka-san! A compelling person doesn’t do that! I believe you must have a personal connection to one ghost in particular, possibly to do with unfinished business surrounding games—Uno is very good at creating trust issues very quickly—and one thing led to another! Thus, here we stand, having beat in your face, with the offer to help you resolve your long-standing trauma so we can all go to bed!”

A heavy silence hunkered down. It coiled protectively over the sanctity of reason and common sense. 

Johanna took a deep breath, then stood up again. 

“Well, Morioka-san?” she said brightly. “Let’s not dawdle. If we can be done by sunrise Yilan won’t even hit you.”

 _“If,”_ Yilan said darkly.

Yugi’s face had done some weird things over the course of Johanna’s Outburst. Currently it was trying to shut the door between past and present, and going by the deeply disturbed grimace, several important hinges had failed.

At least Morioka-san was taking things well. Evil plan sufficiently psychoanalyzed, he bowed his head and sniffled. 

“Things got a bit out of hand,” he admitted wetly. “At first I tried to call mum, but all she did was tell me to be good and live my own life, and what was I supposed to do with that? So I called Grandma, but there’s a reason they say you shouldn’t wake a sleeping tiger, and anyone who knew Grandma knew she could bite off your hand in her sleep...”

“While I’m glad we’re onto the denouement part of the arc,” Yilan interrupted, “could we continue this conversation inside? In your game shop, maybe?”

Morioka-san sniffled again. “Alright,” he said sadly. “We... we might as well. I’ll show you a few of my games while we’re there. If you’re as good at emergency exorcisms as knife fights we might even be able to use the back room.”

* * *

Ayagami was a quaint little town, brimming with that not-too-old sort of charm a lot of towns between Tokyo and Kyoto had. It was shabby in a cozy way. No one in their right mind would choose to move there if they had any semblance of an established living, but an argument could be made for development companies.

Morioka-san had worked at a real estate firm for a few years. He’d had a good go passing land around here and there, but somewhere between one all-nighter and the next his brain tried to perceive the entire universe all at once and suffered a catastrophic failure.

The commonly used term was _god-awful depressive spiral_. Morioka-san didn’t like that term. He preferred “My nightmares came back to hunt me—yes, hunt, not haunt—except this time they were throwing bricks! And you know how they say your hometown fixed all problems or something? Well, I had a big wad of cash and a bigger hole in my head, so I packed up my bags, waved down a few connections, and went home.”

That was all perfectly normal if not a little worrying, but isolating oneself in a dinky little town like Ayagami, which, by virtue of being a quaint little town, takes quite a different shape in reality than it does in childhood memory, is not typically the first step recommended by medical professionals. Combine that terrible sense of spatial dissonance with a neurochemical riot, and out pops bad decisions. 

The game shop was more of a safehouse than a business venture, and the journey through the lands of online forums and occult readings was... a hobby? Maybe a coping mechanism? It was hard to tell, really.

Grief was a sneaky thing. You kept it in your pocket because losing it felt _wrong_ , in a weird way, but every time you sat down it had a chance of falling out and pricking you. Once you got over the initial shock it didn’t get any better, since now you remembered that little needle existed and forgot all about how to move without it sticking in your leg.

The ghosts were a thing that just happened. Morioka-san hadn’t lost any family members in any untimely, tragic incidents. They died! What a surprise. But they died of natural causes, no surprise roasting anywhere, and one could say they died quite happy.

The only connection between then and now was that Morioka-san used to play Go with his grandmother and get absolutely brutalized. He was a bit better at chess, so one day he thought: well, they’re both boards, and if you go in with a craft knife and a bit of paint, it doesn’t look _too_ bad. 

But once you lose one game, you try another, and another, maybe toss in a shadow game here and there, practice against a few unsuspecting ghosts, learn a bit of sleight of hand, rile up an entire town’s worth of ghosts using definitely-not-made-up “house rules”, frantically push away anything whose silhouette even vaguely resembles a threat, rinse and repeat.

Which... actually, that probably explained why his grandmother was so pissed off at him. If there’s no door you shouldn’t just start knocking on a wall, and if you’re going to drag someone out of their eternal rest for a game of Ouija board chess— 

Johanna felt a little bad. She _had_ whacked Morioka-san across the face with a chair, but Morioka-san had also marched into town screaming through a ghost megaphone, then expected its furious paranormal residents to play nice. And when ghosts start stalking you and all you’ve got is a rigged deck, what can you do but toss out a few cheap matches?

At the very least, it was nice to get some closure. Part of Johanna was kicking herself—that whole dramatic spiel about personal connections and long-standing trauma was a tad foolish in hindsight, wasn’t it?

She had assumed that Morioka-san was special. Obviously he wasn’t. Who was? Behind every perplexing scene was an individual with extraordinarily mundane problems. 

“Hold on a moment,” said Yilan, looming over her tea with narrowed eyes. “You didn’t even—I thought you had some sort of... I don’t know, grudge or deep heartbreak, or—” 

“One could say I did,” Morioka-san said firmly. 

“Guess I don’t have any room to talk,” Yilan muttered. She loomed back the way she came and sunk down into her chair. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to shout. I just expected—” here she made the universal gesture for _explosions of apocalyptic scale_ “—terrible, awful stuff. The kind of things you see in your nightmares, but worse, because they found the escape latch. But you’re just a wiry old capitalist.”

“Better a capitalist than an evil necromancer,” said Johanna. Then she hesitated. “Or maybe it’s the opposite way around?”

“Trust me when I say the capitalist’s more stubborn,” Yugi said, in complete monotone.

Morioka-san shifted uneasily. Yugi had been giving him the same unnerving stare since they had all sat down for tea, which was really something. Even Yilan had blunted her edges after they bashed against Morioka-san’s... unique circumstances. 

All this left Johanna as the only person who wasn’t liable to lash out with teeth, knives, or Lovecraftian shadows. Over the course of the conversation, Morioka-san had slowly but surely shuffled his way beside her.

There were a great deal of chairs in the room. Johanna had personally broken one over Morioka-san’s face. She was also the least terrifying entity in the room.

Okay, thought Johanna. Yugi has a few ghosts to banish, and they probably look a bit too much like Morioka-san’s for anyone to be comfortable.

So... why not drag them out to air? If this week got even weirder they’d end up with even more evidence to disprove chaos theory, and if it came to blows Johanna had immediate access to both her swatter _and_ several hefty furnishings.

What could go wrong?

“Morioka-san,” Johanna said, prompting the wiry old capitalist to turn fearfully toward her. “I’m not going to hit you, don’t worry. I just have a few questions about shutting this operation down.”

The tension left Morioka-san’s shoulders. “Oh, good. Go ahead, then. I want to have a decent night’s rest as much as the lot of you.”

“Very well. Am I correct to assume that you’ve tried to screw the lid on before this point, but couldn’t get it to stick?”

“A more apt metaphor would be to say I dropped the jar, and when I went to clean it up I knocked over a whole shelf of jars,” Morioka-san said miserably.

“You mean your attempts at shadow games?”

“I still find ‘attempts’ a bit offensive, but yes.” A gloomy sigh erupted from Morioka-san’s lungs, and he slid down in his chair. “I figured if the whole thing started from a game, then it ought to end by a game as well. Look where that got me!”

From across the table, Yugi grimaced. 

Usually he tried to be subtle, or at least appeared to make the attempt. Catching his expression now was like slowly backing your way out of a den of bears and watching one twitch. But between hungry bears and a very upset Yugi, only one of them could damn you to an eternity of picking up bits of your own face. The bear route probably wasn’t less painful, but at least they had the decency to eat you in one go.

“You... aren’t entirely wrong,” said Yugi. His face was in the middle of a dramatic trauma-parsing journey. The atmosphere in the room indicated that it would be a tremendously bad idea to point this out to him. 

Morioka-san, ever the headstrong warrior, pressed on. “In reference to which part, may I ask? My track record when it comes to making good decisions under mental turmoil isn’t the best.”

“Yes, but it’d be wrong to fault you for matters out of your control,” said Yugi. 

A very meek Morioka-san remained silent. He was probably listening for the sound of a fizzling fuse.

Yugi sighed. He dropped his face into his hands. He was alarmingly unresponsive, if not for the fact that he wasn’t breathing then because he didn’t even flinch when Johanna set the swatter onto the table.

“Earth to Yugi?” Yilan said delicately. “Hello? Are we all still sane here?”

“Unfortunately,” Yugi said, excavating his face from the depths of his palms. Goodness, his eyeliner was _resilient._ He was rubbing his arms like he wanted desperately to be held but didn’t know how to go about it in public— _bad thought, bad thought._ Maybe leave that for _after_ the acquaintanceship test period, no?

Johanna propped up what she hoped was an easy smile. “Well! I don’t know about all that. But it seems like you do, Yugi. Would you care to enlighten us?”

 _No_ , said his body language. “Of course,” said Yugi’s mouth. 

“Oh,” said Morioka-san. “Well, I appreciate the assistance. I, er, didn’t mean to make such a mess...”

Yugi dismissed the rest of his sentence with a wave of the hand. “I can hardly blame you, can I? Ayagami is in a very strange state right now, but sometimes life is like that to such a degree that you might as well roll with the punches. Or rather, you _should_ , because it hurts badly if you don’t.”

“Er. Yes!”

“You mentioned that you began the current chain of events with a game. May I ask what you did, exactly?”

Morioka-san fidgeted nervously. “Well,” he said timidly, in the tone of a man who is about to go on a tangent, “I thought... I mean, I was in a bad place. Or at least my head was. Ayagami is a nice town! Or so I thought, but...”

“But?”

“In my mind I had a different image of how everything was going to go down,” Morioka-san admitted. “I was going to figure out who I was, muster up some courage, put my head back on straight. Apparently self-discovery is a road made up of potholes and _maybe_ pavement if you’re lucky, but who is?”

“Hear, hear,” muttered Yilan.

“So I thought: my god, can’t I do anything right?” Morioka-san continued, to the collective pity of the room. “Chess always cheered me up, and playing with Grandma always used to give me a big fat ladle of reality.” The slouched form of a wiry old capitalist melted further into wood and cushion. “Can you guess what happened next?”

“So the catalyst was a chess game with your grandmother,” said Yugi.

Morioka-san nodded sadly. “And she just about destroyed me. I guess once you’re dead you might as well spend your days polishing your board game prowess. As if it wasn’t shiny enough, ha ha.”

His fake little laugh was almost painful to listen to. “Well, Yugi?” said Johanna, determined to put Morioka-san out of his misery. “You’re our specialist here. What do we do?”

“It’s very simple,” said Yugi. “Morioka-san started everything by losing to his grandmother. All he needs to do is win against her.”

Such a solution seemed incredibly simple in comparison to the events preceding it. Johanna turned to Morioka-san, ready to congratulate him on the good news, and saw the physical manifestation of despair instead.

The cogs clicked. “Oh,” said Johanna. “You must be unbelievably bad at chess.”

“I am _not!_ ” Morioka-san shouted. His brief outburst of anger was quickly swallowed by the gaunt expression of regret. “You’ve never played against Grandma. She’s a chess _fiend!_ There’s no winning against her!”

Now was not a good time to make any funny quips, which was exactly why Yilan said, “Why not have Yugi play her instead?”

Morioka-san shimmied his back up the chair. “Would that work?” he asked hopefully.

“I don’t see why not,” said Yilan. “The way I see it, a game only has two outcomes: win or lose. Right? You’ve tried one and it didn’t work. If you can’t figure out the other, why not have someone else do it for you? A win’s a win no matter who does the winning.”

“We _do_ have a King of Games on hand,” Johanna allowed. 

All eyes turned to the resident King of Games, who was giving Morioka-san not just a run but a marathon for his money when it came to how uncomfortable a person could look in the confines of the human body. Yugi, Johanna had discovered, was expressive insofar as he wasn’t consciously trimming down his smile or caught entirely off guard. 

The third scenario was manifesting itself, and that scenario was: when he had his back to the wall, facing down his own terrible empathy and a rerun of memories he _really_ wanted to keep dead and buried.

Yilan gave Johanna a worried glance. Johanna nodded back.

Morioka-san, who did not spend the past few days bonding and chatting and unearthing past regrets over curry, beamed. “Oh, I would _love_ some assistance,” he said. “I’ve never been good at the whole looking-ahead thing, er, as you can probably tell, but in chess I’m even worse! But if you’re really as good as they say, Mutou-san, then I’d love to—”

“No,” said Yugi. 

Morioka-san faltered. It was like watching a baby fall off a high chair. “I... pardon?”

“No,” Yugi said again. His tone was tragically definitive. 

Before Morioka-san could prod in with any unwise comments, Johanna cleared her throat loudly. _“Morioka-san,”_ she said, stern as bull and with equal presence. “Could we have a moment with Yugi? It’s not about you, I promise. We’d just like to collect our thoughts.”

“Oh. Oh! Yes, of course!” Morioka-san stood, eyes shining with hope. That particular strand of hope was that of thirty-something year-olds who had blundered in every way possible and feared failure as much as death, which was none. “I’ll let you chat a bit, make up your minds, figure out a plan of attack, and all that. In the meantime... oh, I suppose we could use some more tea...”

All the teacups in the room were full and cold. Morioka-san ducked out of the room and into the adjacent kitchen.

Johanna and Yilan were quiet for what they perceived to be a respectful amount of time. Needless to say, Yilan was pouncing within fifteen seconds.

“Okay,” she said diplomatically. “Do you want to kickstart this conversation, or should we get Johanna to go in with a scalpel?”

The legions of exhaustion marched in Yugi’s eyes. “What do you want me to say?” he asked. “For all I know you’ve put two and two together and just want me to drive the final nail into the coffin. God knows it’s a comfortable coffin.”

Putting two and two together wasn’t particularly difficult arithmetic. It was _understanding_ the two and two that made your brain tie itself into loops. Currently the two and two hinted at past experiences that kind of _really_ sucked, possibly a game of relative importance won against a ghost of extreme importance. 

For all Johanna knew, Yugi’s situation wasn’t that complicated once you jumped the initial hurdle of _what the fuck_. Compared to the endless juggling of bond interest payable and premiums and discounts, playing lethal card games with a ghost was a simple debit to wild bar stories, credit to deep emotional trauma...

Accounting jargon didn’t make the situation any better. Johanna was appropriately crushed.

“I don’t want to be insensitive here,” Johanna began, figuring that was as good a disclaimer as any, “but I was under the impression that we were here to bust a ghost rave. Are we still on the same page?”

“Yes,” said Yugi.

“And to toss everyone in the paddy wagon, we need to guarantee that Morioka-san has one game swing in his favour, yes?”

“That’s about right.”

Whenever Yugi spoke, it was with a sort of gentle authority, like he was suggesting you do something some way because he’d nicked himself doing it before. The wisdom of experience deserved a sticker and also a long, _long_ break from life.

Oh, thought Johanna, as a week’s worth of casual conversation, easy smiles, and Occasional Outbursts finally clicked. Well! I don’t know about all that.

And all that was a lot more than either Johanna or Yilan could properly deal with. What a shame! What an awful shame. The least you could do to resolve a moral quandary was toss in out entirely, yes? Well, probably not, since that was irresponsible and if you didn’t at least yell “look out!” you deserved whatever people hurled back, but you owed it to your weird, squishy-cheeked, metal-studded acquaintance. Right?

Johanna and Yilan shared another glance. 

Yilan’s eyebrows did a little wobble. With her shoulders, she gave a helpless shrug. _Why the hell not?_ said the shrug.

Well, if _Yilan_ was fine with it...

And Johanna _wanted_ to help Ayagami out, alright? But sometimes you had to have a little faith in humanity, not because anyone did anything heroic, but because the alternative dropped a large boulder on many toes.

Humanity could use more faith, anyway. What else were you going to invest faith in? The future?

“Well, alright,” said Johanna. 

Yugi’s expression was valiantly despondent. The marathon of misery had him bracing for a punch to the mouth but Johanna had tripped him instead. 

Brows shot up, furrowed down, and rearranged into surprise. “...Pardon?” said Yugi.

“It’s no big deal,” said Johanna. “If you don’t want to play, then that’s that.”

“We should have Morioka-san handle it anyway,” Yilan added. “What’s to say he won’t sneeze over a game of Catan and feed the stock market to the shadows? As much as I’d love to watch consultants and analysts trade each other to death—I suppose they already do that, to a degree? Anyway, Morioka-san needs one W, and he ought to earn it himself!”

“Invest in the future by investing in humanity,” Johanna mused aloud. “I suppose we could give it a try.”

The tension left Yugi’s shoulders first, and then his jaw. He deflated like a sad balloon, or at least a deeply contemplative one. 

“You’re taking this much better than I expected,” he said. His voice had a certain, how do you put it, _about-to-cry_ quality.

“Well, problem-solving is an important life skill,” Johanna said brightly.

“And ghosts can remain ghosts for all I care,” Yilan said resolutely.

By the time Morioka-san wandered back in, his countenance had gotten a better grip on circulating colour to his cheeks. He was practically vibrating with energy and possibly mania. 

“How was it?” he asked. Before anyone could respond, he hurried on, “No, no! That’s alright. Just tell me when you want a go at the Ouija chess board and I’ll—” 

“Morioka-san!” Yilan declared, leaping out of her seat with devastating intensity. 

Morioka-san looked as if his soul had been scared out of his body. “Er, yes!” he said, trying to match Yilan’s volume and coming significantly short.

A brave man, that Morioka-san. He stood petrified as Yilan marched over and slung an arm over his shoulders. For a moment it seemed like Morioka-san’s soul really _did_ escape, but of course Yilan had faster reflexes and shoved it back in.

“Morioka-san,” she repeated. “Congratulations! You’ve just earned yourself a private chess-cramming session with the King of Games himself! People would kill for this kind of opportunity, Morioka-san, and they likely have! You’ll hold this experience close to your heart and go on living as a better man, I’m sure! Do you have any comments, Morioka-san?”

“I, er, I don’t—”

“Well said!” Yilan thumped Morioka-san on the back, causing various internal processes to reverse. “Then you have a long and exciting day ahead of you! Go get some rest, sleep off those eyebags, and our good friend Yugi will guide you on the road of complete chess superiority!”

Morioka-san gaped. His mouth opened and closed in a desperate bid for reason. Eventually, he found the courage to peer at Yugi.

Yugi, to his credit, was putting on a very convincing show. “Once you mess with the shadows they tend to remember your shape,” he said lightly. “While we’d love to help if any future problems arise, Yilan and Johanna might find international travel difficult and Seto’s secretary would bite your throat out. Shall we invest in our shared future, Morioka-san?”

“I wasn’t aware I still had one,” Morioka-san said glumly. 

“Oh, don’t be like that,” said Yilan, giving Morioka-san another gamely thump. The poor man let out a honk of surprise. “Everybody has a future, no matter what kind of indecipherable abstract it might be.”

“I’d also suggest that you find a hobby,” said Johanna. “It might help you settle some internal debates.”

Morioka-san threw one last glance across the room.

Exhaustion swept over him like a tidal wave, and by the slouch of his shoulders it appeared he wasn’t the best swimmer. “Alright,” he finally said. “I’m an adult, aren’t I? I ought to figure out my own problems. Surely I can pick up a few strategies, parse through a few pep talks...”

“Good man,” said Yilan. She glanced at the time and frowned. “See you in six hours or so, I guess?”

Morioka-san offered a dismissive wave. “I’ll take you all out to dinner. It’s the least I can do. And... Mutou-san?”

Yugi’s smile was brittle. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry for—” There was a long pause. Morioka-san shook his head. “I’m sorry. For... everything, I suppose. You should get some rest as well.”

And with that, Yilan led them out the door, promised to text Morioka-san as soon as they were awake and hungry, then ushered them all the way back to the hotel and up to her own room without so much as blinking.

She sat Yugi down on the bed. Johanna took the chair. Yilan went rummaging through her bags and came back with three bottles of Pocari Sweat.

“Well!” she said cheerfully, “I’d say that’s a job well done!”

“Done might be too generous a word,” said Yugi.

“I mean done only for a certain value of done,” said Yilan. “The specific value I’m talking about is: we’ve done all we can, right? The rest is up to Morioka-san, once you bash his head open with magic chess powers.”

“Seto’s the real chess whiz, not me,” Yugi informed her. “But I _do_ have to wonder how mad Seto would be if I called him to ask for advice.”

“Not as mad as Morioka-san’s grandma is, I bet.”

The jitters from a close shave with reality still hung on Yugi’s small form. But he cracked open his bottle anyway, and if the lighting wasn’t tossing the lighting a full ninety degrees off, then that might have been a shadow of a smile on his face.

See? thought Johanna. And so we progress. We grow. We make compromises but at least we’re aware of what we’re losing.

 _Maybe_ there was more to be said. _Maybe_ there was a more optimal way of approaching matters of the heart. _Maybe_ all anyone could really do was their best, whether that was marching determinedly through life or packing up all your belongings and moving out of the city.

It was all a matter of perspective. Besides, there was nothing a good camera and smart editing couldn’t polish into a diamond.

* * *

At the end of the day, Morioka-san was still a sharp man, no matter how many times he’d tripped over his own shoelaces.

Johanna didn’t care for chess that much, but she was excellent at reading the atmosphere. So when Yilan went _ooh_ , she went _ooh_ as well, and when Yugi smiled in pleasant surprise, Johanna leaned in, invested in... something! Wow!

According to Yugi, Morioka-san was improving at an impressive pace. One could chalk up his sudden prowess to a good teacher, a more settled state of mind, or some private epiphany. Could it be all three? Of course it could! Though Johanna wasn’t going to go rummaging through someone else’s brain anytime soon, and Morioka-san was probably thankful for it.

By the end of the week Morioka-san was walking and talking and eating like a human being while slowly evolving into a chess god, which really said something about his lifestyle before taking a face to the chair. By the end of the week Johanna and Yilan also had bookings to make good in Kyoto, and Yugi had a promotional match to tear to shreds.

Morioka-san had promised to see them off. The ghosts were still angry, he had said, but the presence of three very scary interlopers had brought them down a notch. Now it was up to Morioka-san and his Ouija chess board.

“I think you’ll be alright,” Yugi told Morioka-san. “You’re quick when it comes to patterns and problem-solving with concurrent variables. If you do run into any hiccups, please text me. Alright?”

“Alright,” said Morioka-san. He fidgeted for a second before continuing, “And I’m really sorry—” 

“I think I’m a little tired of apologies,” said Yugi. “That, and farewells.”

Morioka-san began to fervently study his shoes.

But the smile that Yugi had plastered on his face was anything but sarcastic. One might even call it genuine, or relieved, or hopeful. But who was Johanna to say? Throw out the adjectives and let the angels decide! Send them off with a smile! But turn a little further toward the camera, if you could!

“You’ll be just fine, Morioka-san,” said Yugi. “Oh, and one last thing...”

Morioka-san peeked up. He was met with an outstretched hand and a playing card.

Johanna and Yilan leaned in. 

_Marshmallon_ , read the card. It boldly thrust upon the world a pink, oblong thing that might have been Kirby after a few rounds in a particularly brutal washer. 

“Oh,” said Morioka-san, gingerly accepting the card. He clearly had no idea if he’d just taken a piece of Yugi’s soul or not, but he was approaching the situation with caution regardless. “This is a Duel Monsters card, isn’t it?”

“It is!” said Yugi. “In recent years I’ve adopted a habit of passing on cards to people I think could use a bit of luck.”

Morioka-san gave a small but bright grin. “Well, I can’t protest any luck that comes my way, now can I?”

In the distance, rapidly drawing nearer, a train chugged its merry way through the country, indifferent to the spectacular events taking place in each individual town. The world was a vast place and ghosts came a dime a dozen, so why bother?

Yilan hoisted up her camera. It was rolling, naturally. 

“Good luck, Morioka-san,” she said, grinning a feral grin. “Something tells me you’ll need it.”

Johanna rolled her eyes. “Feel free to get back to us for a follow-up,” she added. “Or don’t, if that’s what you like. Oh, and think about investing in a flyswatter, okay? That or sturdier chairs. Dealer’s choice.”

“Will do,” said Morioka-san.

The train came to a slow halt. Yugi watched the doors open with some kind of... weird, startled look, like he’d just realized that sooner or later reality would set in and the world would be watching.

A classic case of stage fright! And other deeper problems, but who wants any of that? Obviously the best solution is to make the audience so incredibly passionate about promoting their own merchandise that you forget why you were nervous at all!

Morioka-san gave one last wave as the train pulled away. In a matter of moments Ayagami and all its funny ghosts was a matter of _back then_ instead of _right now._

Once her suitcase was thoroughly beaten into submission overhead, Johanna turned to Yugi with a scrutinizing gaze.

“What is it?” said Yugi, shuffling his belongings beneath his feet.

“Hm,” said Johanna. “Yes, I think you’d be a medium at most.”

“Medium? Go small,” said Yilan. 

Yugi blinked. “I’m confused.”

“Hoodie sizes.”

“Ah. Okay?”

“Once you finish your whole show,” Yilan went on ruthlessly, “you get a hoodie. A _Funky Ghouls_ hoodie. And you’re going to wear it.”

Yugi did not appear to understand the gravity of the situation. “I like hoodies,” he said innocently.

Johanna and Yilan shared a look. More of A Look, actually.

“Good,” they said in tandem, and took their seats.

For the rest of the ride Yugi kept giving them curious glances, as if Yilan was going to punch someone in the throat or Johanna was going to rip a seat out of the floor and beat him with it. And wasn’t that cute? The poor boy thought _violence_ was as worse as it could get.

The Internet was a vast place. Almost as vast as the world, but with more memes.

Yugi needed a hobby, didn’t he? And when he didn’t need a hobby, he needed an escape, right? Of course right.

“Welcome aboard,” Johanna told Yugi, as they stepped into Kyoto. Yugi gave her a confused but well-meaning smile. Oh, the Internet would love him. They would wage wars over him. The realm of ghost hunting and Duel Monsters would meet in the most spectacular singularity to ever grace the human race. And it would be tragic, because he would never know. “I hope you enjoyed your time with us, and trust me when I say it gets even weirder.”

But of course Johanna had underestimated Yugi. Defying expectations wasn’t good enough. It was about defying the _universe._

Yilan’s face was split in a wicked smile, all teeth and promise. Yugi mirrored it with a little more restraint and a lot more teeth. 

Johanna held out a hand. Yugi took it.

“Now _that_ ,” he said, “is something I can work with.”

* * *

**[3:22] jo:**  
hey how does this look  


 **[3:24] yugi:**  
johanna is it not 3am in Canada at the moment

 **[3:25] jo:**  
irrelevant. answer the question

 **[3:25] yugi:**  
...how many more of these do you have

 **[3:25] jo:**  
oh i am SO glad you asked

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in case anyone was wondering, the sticker is from granblue fantasy! they're a joy and look like they're going through some kind of out of body experience all the time. it's wonderful.
> 
> and if anyone wants a bit more info on johanna and yilan that isn't spread out across 28k:
> 
>   * johanna: comes from a cursed scottish bloodline, currently lives in canada, reluctantly studying accounting
>   * yilan: a chinese canadian exorcist, also lives in canada, a com sci major
>   * they both attend (throws dart at map) uoft st. george because i think the campus is cool and their libraries are sick. yeah. yeah 
>   * johanna and yilan never actually post any of their crazier clips in case some overzealous self-proclaimed exorcists stick their head in a dark hole and get it bitten right off
> 

> 
> i like to imagine yugi as the catalyst for the collision between the duel monsters and paranormal hunting community online. yugi pops into haunted locations to make sure everything's going okay and nobody's keeling over because of a bad uno hand, and sometimes he gets caught on camera, and he really means well but he's also really busy when he isn't actively evading his problems, and cryptids aren't _that_ easy to spot, are they? of course not. yugi is most definitely not a cryptid. (he is an internet cryptid but he also features in a good number of funky ghouls videos. nobody knows what to think. are they ALL cryptids? are cryptids allowed to have a youtube channel? are cryptid allowed to sell merch?)
> 
> thank you so much for reading! feel free to talk to me at my [twitter](https://twitter.com/novalotypo)!


End file.
